Lady Rosamond's book

by Lucy Ellen Guernsey

"You did, Madam!" I answered. "A ghost appeared to me and I chased it with the bed staff into the closet yonder and locked it up, and now it is scared and wants to get out."

Madam looked as if she thought my wits were wandering, and as well as I could for laughing, I told her the tale. Then suddenly the wickedness and unkindness of the trick flashed on me, and I fell to crying as hard as I had laughed.

Madam soothed and kissed me, and making me lie down, she said she would fetch me some drops from her room—"and then I will call your father, and we will unearth this ghost of ours."

When she was gone, Prudence renewed her pleadings. "Oh, Mistress Rosamond, do let me out. My master will kill me!"

"I can't," said I. "Madam has taken the key—" (as indeed she had, thinking, I dare say, that I should relent). "Whoever you are, you must bake as you have brewed. I fear the bread will not be to your taste."

My father and mother entered even as I spoke, and going at once to the door, my father unlocked and threw it open. There stood Mistress Prudence, arrayed as I had seen her, for in the darkness she had not been able to find her own gown, and looking as foolish and venomous as a fox caught in a poultry yard.

I pass over the scene that followed—my father's stern wrath, which my mother vainly strove to mitigate, and Prue's tears and exclamations that she meant no harm, and it was only a joke, and so on.

"It is a joke that shall cost you dear," said my father, grimly. "You shall spend the night in the prison you have chosen, and in the morning you leave this house forever. But for her sake whose memory you have outraged, the rising sun should see you set in the stocks on the village green as a thief and an impudent witch."

"I am no thief!" sobbed Prudence. "I never took so much as a hair."

"Where got you the clothes you wear—and that rosary by your side—wretch that you are!" interrupted my father, his wrath rising as he recognized my mother's beads and cross, which he had always kept on his own table. "Here, you men and women—" for by this time half the household were gathered at the door—"come in and see this woman, who has dared to dress up in her sainted lady's clothes to scare my daughter. Look at her well! For by this hand you will not see her soon again!"