"...A time when the United States is what we fight for..."
The occupants of the Grisham Hall boarding house were no strangers to the war effort. Brothers, cousins, old flames, and current sweethearts have been wrenched from their grasp, the only co...
"She turned to me Blind in the fray Weight of this world She will not be tamed"
blind in the fray by the last revel
|| Jeannette Edwards ||
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February 3rd 1944
When the doorbell rang at the Grisham Hall for Ladies, it was a house-wide thrill, shivering down the very spine of the building and sending chills into every resident. A doorbell ring, with its chime calling every girl to their feet in a downward flight, could mean one of two things: a visitor or a postman. Visitors, particularly of the sought-after male variety, were scarce since the war had been put on to boil some three years previously. Now, with the residents tending home fires and not the flaming passions of suitors, a postman was more likely. A postman, or rather post-boy, was the only kindling to the fires of romance.
But, on a dim February morning with the sky heavy and ready to bleed, the doorbell had been run and so began the usual stampede of pumps on hardwood floors. There should have been only two possibilities and yet, Jeannette Edwards wasn't a postman or anything that the anxiously awaiting faces expected. She had rung the bell and stepped back in surprise and a tiny bit of fright at the fervor and hunger that met her behind the door wrenched from its frame by a seemingly harmless girl.
She shouldn't have been so ferocious of a predator as she seemed, this little thing with short brown hair and a dickie color edged in red ribbon but Jeannette stepped back all the same. This hadn't been what Jeannette had expected either.
Grisham had come highly recommended, as a good, upstanding place for good, upstanding girls. Jeannette thought she had fit that description rather well and had packed her things in the carpetbag she now clutched tightly in one whitened fist. Could this carpetbag that had first belonged to her mother be used as a weapon to fend off this frightening girl and her hungry eyes?
"You aren't Davis," The girl huffed and moved to shut the door. Jeannette hadn't come all the way from Hughestown to be turned away by someone looking for a Davis but she didn't move fast enough.
A hand, surely one of God's angels come down from heaven, stopped the door before the girl could shut Jeannette out from her new home.
"Sorry about that," The hand's owner said. She might as well have been an angel as she pushed the door open again, giving a full view of her face. Not nearly as intimidating as this little rabid creature before her but there was something in her dark eyes that didn't set Jeannette completely at ease.
"Oh," Jeannette said. "That's quite alright."
"It isn't really. Bess turns into a monster when she hasn't heard from her beau in a few days," The girl said, tossing her long black curls over her shoulder. She wore them loose, a stark contrast to the tight pins in the other girl, Bess's, locks of chestnut brown. "Sorry, you had to be in her path."
