The hyperactive girl was darting from tree to tree like a ferret on crystal meth, but Arianna couldn’t help but smile at the girl’s exuberance. When Lanna finally joined her on the loungers, her arms were full of coconut husks, palm leaves, sand dollars, and various and sundry other beach treasures.
“Look, Ri! Look what I found!” The girl held up a tiny shell whose underside was an iridescent purple. The staff looked on fondly, appreciating the energy of the girl, and the smiles she easily gave and elicited in turn. The girl who kept the gardens tended had even taken to trying to teach her the local words for different things.
Lanna’s tongue was clumsy with the foreign syllables but that never stopped her from trying, nor did the titters and snickers from nearby as she butchered the words. She’d simply flash them a complicit grin, as though she had just uttered a mouthful of curse words, wink, and soldier on.
Temperance tut-tutted from the shade nearby, ever at odds with the girl’s insistent use of shortened nomenclature. It ran contrary to the stalwart woman’s sensibilities, which was just fine with Arianna, as the rare find of some with sensibilities that were nearly as unbendable as her own was only one of many qualities which had endeared the woman to her, and lead to her becoming a permanent fixture in the young woman’s household.
“You’re not going to win any popularity contests with Lady Temperance if you insist on calling me Ri,” she said wryly, her lips puckered, but her eyes sparkling. Lanna glanced up from her treasures to check for signs of sarcasm, something she had learned to do in the early moments of their acquaintance to avoid paranoid delusions of recrimination. Detecting the glimmer in her mentor’s eyes, she grinned that complicit little grin of hers and peered over her shoulder at the matronly woman, and gave her a withering look of disdain to match the one being leveled in her own direction.
“You really must learn to be more flexible, Tempie, or you’re liable to become obsolete, and Ri may be forced for forgo your employ.” They all three of them knew that nothing could be farther from the truth, but Lanna had taken up the habit of leveling these types of jabbing proclamations at Ri’s majordomo with the smooth fervour of an epithet, but with the gently ruffled edges of a familial jest.
It pleased the young heiress beyond measure to watch the two grow closer with each passing day. Ri depended on Temperance for so much, and it meant the world to her that she had taken so quickly to Lanna, who was not simply some pet project of hers, despite what Tempie quipped. And Lanna held the house keeper cum matron of the house in the same abiding love and esteem which she held her patron.
She herself a multilingual polymath, Arianna intended to give Lanna every opportunity to further her own education in whatever area or direction which she dared to pique an interest. It behooved her to lock the world away behind the doors of the labyrinthine library for whole afternoons while Tempie and Lanna swapped barbs in front of the fireplace, and Lanna gushed over some fascinating new bit of geography, biology or history that had caught her attention in the moment.
Arianna would never have children of her own, due to health complications, and while she had always said that she would adopt, it was this 19 year old waif whom had captured her heart and her attention.
Even Tepid old Tempie, as Lanna liked to call her, was moved to a snort of derision when Master Harper was heard to utter the phrase, “The stench of purity in this abode since you took on that rascallion of an understudy, has doubled, if not tripled.” The dark, gothic, self proclaimed devil worshipper was no where near as wayward as he would like to have people think, and basked in the honour of the use of one of Arianna’s arboretums to double as his studio whilst he poured his poet’s soul onto the canvas one artful brushstroke at a time.
Lanna, feeding her own, perverse sense of humour, would spend this time sprawled on the chaise lounge, surrounded by religious study guides, and pick opportune moments to muse aloud about this passage or that parable. It quickly became Arianna’s wont to tend to her plants at these times, after prompting from Temperance after chaperoning one such session.
“If you’re determined to gain your merriment from other people’s suffering,” referring of course, to her own sparring matches with the girl, “Then I would suggest a sit in on the young people’s next visit to the Studio.” came the haughty suggestion.
And so it was that Arianna’s Egyptian domicile quickly became young Lanna’s favourite vacation spot.
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