Summertide Excursion : A 'Storm and Silence' Fan-fiction

Carriage Troubles

'I swear, as soon as we get out of this carriage, I am going to murder your stony behind for dragging me along on this blasted trip!'

I was slumped against the window, sulking and glaring out at the vast expanse of trees and fields of grass that rushed passed. As I watched the landscape roll on and on, I feared that I was beginning to lose what little sanity I had left. For several hours, Karim, Mr Ambrose and I had sat in completely infuriating and absolute silence.

Well, not quite absolute.

Over the course of the journey I had kept up the habit of occasionally trying to get a word out of either of the solemn giants beside me and, to my great surprise, I hadn't been entirely unsuccessful.

Fifteen minutes into the drive I had turned to Mr Ambrose, 'How much longer?'

Of course, his Honourable Insufferableness had chosen to deny me any sort of response.

Wonder of wonders, that man! I'd thought, but I'd had to restrain myself from any further sarcastic thoughts of that nature, or I probably - no, definitely - would have turned around smacked some extensive vocabulary into his stony head.

It hadn't been until the thirty-third time I had asked that question when he finally shifted his head a millimetre in my direction, his jaw clenched in expertly contained rage. 'There is still a very, very, very long way to go, Mr Linton, and if you wish to keep your current position both within this carriage and as my secretary, I suggest that you keep your questions to yourself until we arrive!' He had snapped cooly.

In that moment, I had been overcome by a tremendous urge to slap Mr Ambrose across his immovable visage, but remembering that he was indeed my employer and the one tyrannical individual providing me with a source of income, I had nobly restrained myself. Thus, for the next few hours, we had sat in silence.

That is, until my patience had been reduced to the point of me muttering death threats towards the living iceberg on my right.

'Did you hear me?' I turned, refocusing my glare on Mr Ambrose. 'I said I'm going to kill you!'

'That would be very ambitious of you,' Mr Ambrose stated, still staring out his window, as plainly as though I had suggested taking a nap.

I narrowed my eyes and inched towards him along the black leather bench. 'Would you rather be defenestrated, disembowelled, eye-gouged, stabbed, or struck with that godforsaken cane of yours? Take your pick!'

He shifted his body in a minuscule movement to face mine, and I saw something razor sharp flash across his eyes. 'Threaten me once more and it will be you who has the luxury of choosing their own death sentence, Mr Linton!' His gaze bored into mine, dark, cool, and collected as ever, causing me to sink lower into my seat.

Keeping my eyes firmly locked with his, I spoke in what I hoped was my most threatening voice. 'Oh, my apologies, Sir. Would you prefer electrocution, being burnt at the stake, mutilated, drowned, poisoned, or hung, perhaps?'

At this point, the air between our fuming figures had become so thick with tension that I concluded that, at that present moment, suffocation would have been a perfectly plausible cause of death for the both of us. Bah, figures!

Then, all of a sudden, an odd sensation coming from my leg ripped me from my musings about death - Mr Ambrose's death, that is. I glanced down and realized, in the midst of our glaring match, our legs had become pressed together and the rest of our bodies were dangerously close to following suit. At once, alarm bells went off in the back of my mind.

This is not appropriate, not in the slightest! You're touching knees for pete's sake, and the knees of a man, no less! The manful knees of an extremely male, manly, masculine man!