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+---- Thread: A New Arrival (/showthread.php?tid=1073)
A New Arrival - Aisha Blackwell - 11-21-2025
Aisha Blackwell sat on what she considered to be an old, rickety bench that was so uncomfortable as she watched a few porters unload her luggage. She looked every bit the exotic beauty, but she felt drab in the color black.
Her fanciful hat looked out of place among the workers of the train station, she noted, as she caught glimpses of stares from onlookers as they passed by. Her dress was in different shades of black. She adjusted the hem of her skirt over her leg as she waited for the porters to finish unloading her things. Aisha kept her purse close to her person as she noted the passengers and the employees who passed by. Aisha had been to England before, but as a girl, and it was in London, not this little township or whatever one would call it.
No matter which way she shifted, she could find no comfortable position to sit in. Whether it was her corset, the bench, or a multitude of other things, she did not know. Tucked safely in her purse was a letter of introduction for a man she’d never met before, and to be honest, Aisha wanted very much to be in control of her own life and be a woman of independent means. That was not to be so as she learned the harsh reality of her position now. Now she was to live here in this tiny community with what seemed to her to be no real source of entertainment, and worse, she was to have to economize her spending. The shock of it perturbed her and she was still very much processing the whole situation at large. The voyage over on the ship wasn’t too uncomfortable if you didn’t think about the nosy passengers aboard who wished to know her business on an English ship.
The train. Oh, she hated that thing with its noisy whistles and its jostling of the passengers. She abhorred the whole experience, especially when she encountered a Mr. Wilmington with whom she was very much displeased. The gentleman in question, if you could call him that, made conversation with her, and she found him unbearably droll, and she wanted to disappear each time she encountered the horrible little man. She would have stabbed him with her hatpin if she didn’t feel it would be undignified for herself. Thankfully, she lost his company when he disembarked at the previous stop. He hadn’t had a chance to bid her farewell, and as much as she loved conversation, she was glad to see him go. Giddy, almost you could say.
Aisha looked at her father’s pocket watch to take note of the time. She might be here for a while, she decided as she took from one of her bags a small book of poems from some English author she had just discovered. With her luggage settled neatly next to her, she did not feel that she had overpacked in the slightest. Was four trunks too much, she thought to herself as she turned a few pages of her book.
RE: A New Arrival - Robert Carrington - 11-25-2025
Robert strolled forward with his trolley, looking like he had already been crushed by four trunks – physically and spiritually. Last night had been a late one and he was quite certain he had gotten into a fight. But it could have just been a row with the pavement. Either way, he had lost.
“You take this one, Carrington,” one of his colleagues ordered, and the sniggering told him it was one of the shittier jobs even before looked up.
“Just don’t talk to the young lady,” another colleague chimed in. “We don’t want her family to complain to the NER.”
There were some snorts and sniggers and Robert rolled his eyes. Would they ever drop it? They had turned his every day a living hell ever since he started. Surely he had fully paid for his sins?
He turned to the young lady and her luggage and scowled. And couldn’t this have stayed the fuck home? Wherever home was. India, he suspected from her looks and the fact that she had clearly brought her entire life with her.
“Will you be needing assistance with your luggage, madam?” he asked, in an accent that sounded more appropriate to an Eton schoolboy than a railway porter, and a tone that said ‘please don’t tell me you need assistance with your luggage’.