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Post by SOPHRONIA ASHDOWN on Feb 16, 2012 1:12:35 GMT -5
Church was one of the places Sophronia Ashdown regularly visited on her own; most other places, she went accompanied by her husband, but he had something of a distaste for organized religion. Now he wasn't an atheist, mind you. He wasn't anything of the sort and Sophronia would be the first to let anyone who so much as suggested such slanderous falsehoods about the man she loved so dearly know just how wrong they were. Sumner was just the sort of man who preferred to find God in the comfort of his own drawing room or study. Frankly, Sophie was the same kind of person, but she had to keep up appearances, and besides, St. James' had something that interested her far more than sermons.
St. James' Church had a cemetery.
Sophronia Ashdown loved cemeteries.
Every Sunday after the sermon had concluded, Sophie made her way to the graveyard. If anyone asked her why, she always told them it was to pay her respects to her dearly departed grandparents, who were buried there. It was entirely true that her grandparents had been buried in the St. James' churchyard, but it wasn't entirely true that honoring their memories was what always brought her there. Now, she did feel the slightest bit bad about regularly using her dead relatives as an excuse to wander about the cemetery, but she consoled herself by repeating that this was for a noble cause.
Sophie needed inspiration. She'd finished her first little novella not two months ago. It had come easily and been a meager success. The novel she was working on now was being quite stubborn. She hadn't written much past the first scene (a dark and terribly stormy night) and she had just barely figured out her setting (an old run-down manse on the moors) and she had only begun to flesh out her characters (a pure and virtuous young couple on their way to Gretna Green to get married, their jealous parents, and the ferocious loup-garou who harried them on their journey). It was a good start, she thought, but it was only a start.
Perhaps, Sophronia thought, she might gain inspiration from this haunting place if she visited frequently enough. Her muse needed beaten into submission, that was for certain, and it occurred to her that she might be able to do so by absorbing the delicious gothic-ness of the various places about London.
St. James' cemetery just happened to be the most accessible.
Sophie wandered between tombstones, trying her best to look mournful, wistful, and pensive. That was, after all, how people were supposed to look when they were remembering their departed loved ones. For posterity, she placed a wreath on her grandparents' grave, and then stood, looking about and breathing in the sweet decay. |
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