Tuesday, March 21, 2006

Miss Bridget Jane's Diary Part 5



(You might want to read Parts 1 to 4 - links on sidebar to your left - before reading this installment.)

‘Not Lord Rotherwell?’ I gasped.
‘No.’
‘But . . . the flunky spoke to you.’
He took his foot from the fender.
‘He asked if I was Rotherwell, because he had a message to deliver, but as soon as I told him I wasn’t, he left me and went to look elsewhere.’
I Saw It All.
The whole thing was a humiliating experience, but matters were about to get worse.
‘If you don’t mind, I’m having an important meeting in here in less than five minutes, and I’d like you to leave,’ he said
‘Nothing would give me greater pleasure,’ I replied haughtily.

I turned on my heel and walked out of the door. Unfortunately, it was the wrong door, and I walked straight into the broom cupboard, whereupon a deluge of buckets and brushes landed on my head.
‘As I thought, the cupboards in this house are far too small,’ I said. I mustered what dignity I could and pretended I’d walked into the cupboard on purpose to inspect it. ‘I will inform the mistress of the house at once. She needs to know that her cupboards should be enlarged by about fifty per cent.’
Then leaving the whole ghastly mess behind me I walked out of the door and went back to the ballroom.

‘Oh, Charlotte, there you are, I’ve been looking all over for you,’ said Mama. She did a double take as she saw the state of my dress. ‘Charlotte! What have you been doing to your dress? No, don’t tell me, I don’t want to know. Now look, there’s Lord Rotherwell, and he’s coming this way. Throw back your shoulders and stick out your chest, and we’ll just have to hope he’s too distracted to notice the state of your dress.’

I didn’t do it, of course. I am not a floozy and I don’t mean to behave like one, no matter what Mama might say. Besides, Lord Rotherwell was short and fat. He was also at least forty, or possibly fifty. In fact, he could well have been sixty.
‘I’ve decided not to marry,’ I said.

Amanda Grange

4 comments:

Anonymous said...

Poor Charlotte! But she's being very brave.

I very greedily want lots and lots more episodes of this!

Anonymous said...

That's a relief, because you're going to get more, whether you want it or not :-)

I started writing it after winning the PPP competition on the All About Romance website in 2004 with a similar Regency diary. I loved the idea and wanted to turn it into a book. Other writing projects took over and so itnever got finished, but maybe once I've posted everything I've already written, I'll finally find time to finish it.

Anonymous said...

I've just noticed a snag, which is that I called her Charlotte in the book, not Bridget as she was in the PPP entry, which makes a nonsense of the header. Oh dear, this is why I need a copy editor :-)

Now I'm in a quandary. Should I leave it, or change her name back to Bridget in the next post?

Anonymous said...

Could you edit this post (Diary Part 5) and make her Bridget in it? Probably by the time you post the next installment, people will have forgotten she was temporarily called Charlotte, and if they go back to read the archived parts of the diary they'll see her name is Bridget.

I do think 'Charlotte' suits her better, somehow. But if she's not 'Bridget Jane' then the title doesn't work.