Testing: Day 2

Word Count: 12,009

Summary of Events:

Gabriel chatted with Mrs. Goddard over supper, commenting that he wasn't happy about the amount of time he spent with his horses, and she offered to look for a different job for him; he the received a letter from a woman who said she was a former tutor of his, but he couldn't remember her. Ivy and Thomas arrived at his parents' home after dark and were welcomed warmly before heading to bed. At lunch Gabriel stopped an argument between a couple of men over politics, but he still hadn't found the son of this apparent former tutor of his, who was how she'd even found out about him. Ivy was helping the Bramwell women prepare lunch for the men working on the barn and found herself quite worried.

Excerpt of the Day:

"When she got a moment to glance out the window she could see the men working at the barn. They were still removing the broken, fallen timbers, and a man had gone up on either end and managed to saw the front and rear walls off at the same height as the rest of the walls so that they didn't have to worry about more collapse.

Ivy was worried, though. She wanted them to just take down the whole barn and start again from the beginning. Not that she knew why.

If the bottom portion of the barn was structurally sound, there really wasn't any sense in tearing it down and starting all over again, they could just build onto it and it'd be all fine, she was quite sure.

But yet she wasn't sure. She was worried, and had taken to now avoiding looking out the window as much as possible. It disturbed her that she was so worried, and the worst part was that she couldn't explain why. She felt like it was dangerous, but the men were more than confident that it was fine.

Even Mr. Bramwell and David had told her she was being over-worried and it would all work out just fine — and they should know better than Thomas even because they lived on the same property as the barn and knew how well they cared for it and what kind of condition it was in.

Still, though, Ivy couldn't be at rest. She determined as much as she could to force the fearful thoughts from her mind. Everything would be fine. The barn's walls had stood well for this long, they weren't going to fail now, especially if they weren't even rotted.

Ivy bustled about her work as quickly as she could. She was in a way surprised that no one had asked why she was so worried, but she also wasn't; they'd just met her this morning, they likely didn't know that she was worried, nor did they know what she was worried about — other than Mrs. Bramwell.

It upset her that she was so worried. Everyone else knew there was nothing to be worried about, but she couldn't seem to make the worry go away. It wasn't the first time that such a thing had happened to her, but it was by far the worst she'd felt and the most worried she'd felt.

In the end, every other time, everything had turned out alright, just as everyone else had been so confident of, and she was more than certain it would be the same now, consciously, but her subconscious would not let her stop worrying. It seemed to be clutched in terror, as if her subconscious knew something she didn't, not that she was sure how, she'd not even been here a full day.

Some form of disturbance had been around her since she'd arrived, though, and it only seemed to grow with the passage of time, not lessen, no matter what Ivy did to try and get herself to settle down."