2
763 Words
In the group of Dame Emma. Ladies Sarah Atkins, Harriet Everard, Thereza Birch, Marchioness
Gazelle Gibbons watched Count Aston McCrow Mosdell interceded van Laan. Dame Emma
hadn’t expected this interruption to take place eventually. Occasionally, she scanned the reception
room where her housekeeper, Sohini Cornelles, was standing in a corner, and she was ready to
follow her instructions. She walked to the hallway to where van Laan went. Her impatient
movements had caught eyes from one of the companions. Circumspectly, Lady Thereza Birch,
angling her fanner to the face, whispered.
“No one has seen him naked, and there is a rumor he’s quite large for what a woman is
capable to manage.”
She was in a quick response when Lord of Sharpsburg, Count Mosdell, turned to leave, but
she saw van Laan step forward, and with a seductive grin, she said, “I’m capable of handling
anything that is leasable and enjoyable, Lady Birch. We need that, and it’s an honor, while our
fool husbands and lovers are fighting between wars without reasons at all in those European
fronts.”
Lady Birch smiled with gusto, and she was amused by the playable words of Marchioness
Gibbons.
“I’ll die to have half of what God has given. It may be done as a challenge, and I pull out
my fingers with such frustration. It's fair, isn’t it?”
They laughed. Getting the attention of the ladies, who wanted to know, but kindly either
Thereza or Gazelle refused to share those sensuous thoughts with them.
It was during those ladies’ moments van Laan bowed, and he started walking out of the
room.
Sohini followed him.
3
In the dark right-wing alley of the Old Bailey’s building there was the entry of Newgate Prison.
He commanded the driver to stop but the driver made a stop and his voice reached him.
“It’s here, sir.”
“I’ll walk. You wait for me at Ona’s.”
Walking to the entrance he knocked on the door.
As a small window opened a winced face replied, “What do you want? We cannot take any
foreigners during these hours of night.”
“Just open the door.”
“Insolent.” But he opened the door. “Yes?”
Gysbert stepped into a dim entranceway and put the servant apart. Robert, robbed of a slack
garment, smelling alcohol, appeared.
“What is the call, sir?”
He handed him the royal letter. “You’ve a second to release Mademoiselle Micheline
Purcell.”
He read the letter under the dying flame of the candle and with those stormy features of his
face, a kind of repulse in front of the one had given the letter to him, he ambled to a metal door in
the end of the hallway and came into a dark corridor as voices of agony filled each step. In the
middle of this inferno, a female voice, which through full of sadness, yet in full of hope trying to
touch a merciful heart, a hand to kissing it might bring a humble love, went to van Laan’s arm,
and even in those emotional states, he could not see anything until the quaint man opened the bar
door of this filthy cell to his right. A slap smell of human putrid odor made van Laan shook his
head angrily.
“Give me light here.”
A body, almost naked, lay on the wet floor covered with her own excrement and vomit and
those black rats appeared from her. Van Laan killed as many rats as he could, and his charm
appeared to revolve from him.
“Oh, Marcy God!”
Gysbert van Laan could not control his disappointment. He thought he could but he could
not, and he started hitting him with the open fists, striking him every part of his fat body and for a
moment the jail man made a silent gesture from his own cowardice to stop the beating but he was
petrified by the rainy of fists reaching him as he was looking at the angry gentleman from the floor.
Van Laan kept beating him until his assistant Gerwin Kroes crossed before him and spoke with
him.
“Magnus! Magnus!”
He stopped. He peered at his assistant, and then looked back at the man, sparsely on the
floor, terrified with pain and fear.
“If she dies, I don’t need any royal letter to kill you, animal.” To Gerwin. “How did you
find me?”
“I asked Gudrik when I delivered Rhys to him.”
- Writer
