Over the Wall – A Short Story

By Shira J. Rodriguez

Author’s Note: I owe this story to my lovely friend E.K. Meyer (ofwitandwrittenwords.com). Some time ago, she posted a lovely painting by Filippo Palizzi titled “Over the Wall” and wrote a short dramatised prose version of the scene and what the girl in the painting was looking at over the wall. Inspired by this, I wrote a short story for this portrait and found the concept so delightful, that I thought you, dear reader, might enjoy reading this little piece.

      The morning was warm and sultry and her hair curled into little eddies about her head like the windblown grass on the Yorkshire Moors. Despite all her best efforts to press it down with her sweaty palms, the stray curls would keep bobbing about in the wind like little buds on the stalks of wildflowers in spring. A fresh blush rose a little higher into her red cheeks as she wondered why she even bothered about her hair.

      As if he could see it from such a distance! 

      He was traveling down the hill on that pebbly road below the wall, in his fine lake-blue waistcoat. Not like her scratchy and earthy yellow working clothes that had no ornament. They were simple cotton clothes, bare as her dirt-brushed feet. Common. If her dress had been made of a goldenrod silk or peony satin, then he would have turned his eyes upon her and seen her.

      They said he was wealthy, the people in the village, and that he was a recluse and not at all in the habits of most young gentlemen. He didn’t ride, he didn’t hunt, and he never had parties or balls at his estate – the great house with the gold tips that glared in the sun as you rode down the path. Such a neat path too, without a blade of grass out of place and a quiet sort of slumber over the whole park. Not a single gunshot or the soft flop of a fowl was ever heard from that still wood. But she had seen him from afar and watched him pass every day by her house in the carriage. 

      He had taken that road for as long as she could remember. Why, she had been a grubby little girl then, still sucking her fingers, when she saw him for the first time. A boy with black hair and the finest blue outfit she had ever seen – he was only ever in a blue outfit. It seemed to her that he was in the same one every time, with a white cravat tied at the neck.

      She had never in all her years seen anything so perfect: the crisp fold of his lapels, the unbroken blackness of his hat, the little glint of the buttons in his waistcoat. Oh, she had seen beautiful things before. She had seen the snowdrops peeking out of the muddy snow on an elderly winter day and felt the warm glow of joy that surrounded it like a halo. She had seen the thick clouds of wool from her father’s shorn sheep lying in the wagon and dug her chubby young fingers into their knots. But they all had a wild beauty, not the precise and perfect and opulent – yes, that was it, opulent! – something that he had.

      And then there was that time when the carriage had stopped at the farm, had roiled over the stones, and knocked his head about as they mounted the slope to the house and the driver stepped down. She was eight then, with a mass of unkempt ringlets that were something between the color of wheat and the hue of nutmeg.

      She had run over to meet the driver – he must know of all the curiosities of the young gentleman! – and found that her mother had already fought against the wind to meet the stranger. He had gold buttons, that stranger, she now remembered and wore a brown outfit that was as smooth as leather. That was the first time she ever noticed that the fabric of her favorite dress was a little worn, and the color of her clothes a little faded; it felt as when the sun ducked behind the clouds and left everything grey and pallid.

      He was still speaking to her mother, who nodded and said something or other and bobbed her head again like a wildflower swaying in the wind. She had then disappeared into the house and emerged with a tin mug of something foamy and white – milk, perhaps. 

      The driver with the gold buttons inclined his head and thanked the woman. (The wind had whistled in the girl’s ears too strongly now for her to hear anything at all and she leaned her cheek against the cool stone wall to see the boy within.) But the boy did not come out.

      The driver handed him the cup and the shadow boy within took it and drank as she watched him. When the cup hovered over the window of the carriage again, the driver took it, looked about, and saw her as she wrestled a strand of hair whipping against her lips. 

      She remembered the wild beating of her heart as the man came near her, his brown eyes twinkling and passed her the cup, urging her to “Give it back to the missus,” and thank her mother for the kindness. He seemed a kind man, despite his weathered face, the sort who was wont to quirk his lips with merriment rather than scold after a lark. He dropped a sixpence into her palm, too, and winked at her and trudged back. She had stared at them as the carriage stumbled back down the slope and mounted the next hill up the road until she couldn’t see them, clasping the cold coin in her hand.

      That had been almost a decade ago. 

      Yet for the first time in an age, the carriage was stopping now in the middle of the road, though not in the direction of the house, and the driver, the same cleanshaven fellow with twinkling brown eyes and the weathered face, descended from his seat and whistled. 

      She craned her neck and stood on tiptoe to better see the gentleman in the carriage, her feet brushing against the little weedy cluster of white flowers woven into the garden wall like ivy. She could see the scene a little better now. The driver was bending over a black, long article that had fallen in the dirt, rather like her father’s walking stick. He addressed the nobleman within the carriage. 

      “Next time your lordship ought to be more careful with it, see.”

      The gentleman muttered something, she couldn’t hear exactly what, and the driver, who had held out what appeared to be a cane, withdrew it and opened the door of the carriage. 

      Out of the darkness, the gentleman stepped down - a little awkwardly – and stood in place. 

      And now she could see him as clear as the sun in midday: the aristocratic face and thin lips beneath the unbroken blackness of his hat, the dark ringlets of black hair brushing past the crisp fold of his lapels, the clean, long fingers wrapped around the glinting buttons in his waistcoat. He was so unlike her and everything else she knew, and she thought that she would give all her days to spend one instant in his.

      The driver passed the gentleman his cane with a mutter. But instead of leaning on it, as her father did, the young man immediately commenced striking it against the ground; now by his left foot, now by his right, now again by his left, over and over as he walked into the valley among the heather, feeling about before his feet like one in a dark room on a moonless midnight.

      She pulled her eyes away from the scene and stroked the curves in the wall. Something was not quite right. 

      When he opened his eyes, did he still see darkness?

      But it was too terrible to be true. 

      She dared another glance at his blue figure disappearing into the heather with every labored step, the broad-backed driver in brown by his side, and her soul shed a tear.

      It was too terrible to think that he whom she had envied so long – who seemed so above her station – whom she had spent absent-minded afternoons gazing after every day, longing for him to only turn in her direction and gaze upon her for once, would never see her at all.

      For the man whom she had considered so rich was truly poorer than she.