The Old Rose Garden

A Victorian Romance and Erotica short story
by Lady T. L. Jennings

I was nine years old when the accident occurred. We had been playing hide-and-seek together with a couple of children from the nearby farm by the mill. I had climbed as high as I dared in the old oak that grew on a hill in the field, and I found to my delight and surprise that at the top of the tree was a hollow, and I had managed to squeeze my little body into the crevice of the tree.

I was determined not to come out and reveal my newfound hiding place, even though Stuart and my sisters were calling my name again and again and telling me that we had to go home before the rain.

It was not until the first raindrop fell and I was sure that they had left the field that I started to climb down from the tree. A couple of cows had sought shelter under the thick branches of the tree, but the weather was rapidly turning worse. I tried to climb down faster when I heard the thunder getting closer, and I remembered the relief when my small feet hit the grass-covered ground under the tree, and I started running home.

And after that, everything went stark white.

They say I was unconscious for five days, and the doctors claimed it was a miracle that I survived at all. Everyone said that I should thank God every night and count myself incredibly lucky, especially since the cows under the tree had died and the old oak got split in half when the lightning struck.

That was before I started having the visions.

After that, no one mentioned God or spoke about miracles again, and the vicar’s children were not even allowed to talk to me anymore.

The first time it happened was three weeks after the accident, when I just had come back from the hospital. I was sitting in a lounge chair outside the house to get some fresh air while I was resting. I suffered from occasional headaches and muscle tremors since the accident, and sometimes I heard a high-pitched noise that no one else could detect.

Then suddenly, in front of me, I clearly saw the summer fair that was going to be held down in the village. It was in August, and the entire summer had been unusually dry. In fact, the grass down at the meadow where the fair always was held was yellow and brittle. And all the market stalls and amusement rides were made out of wood. I saw it all getting violently destroyed by flames as plainly as if I was standing there myself, and I watched it burn while people from the village ran screaming in panic around me.

There was only one problem: what I saw had not come to pass yet.

My parents assumed that I had had a seizure and took me to a specialist in Birmingham. The doctor that examined me had cold hands and sent my parents home with the reassurance that there was nothing wrong with me. I was just a young little girl that had survived a bizarre and uncommon accident. Sleepwalking and vivid nightmares were to be expected but nothing to worry about, he assured them, even though I insisted that I had not been asleep in the lounge chair.

No one believed me.

However, the following week the village fair burned down to the ground. My parents and siblings never talked about it, but our governess and two of the under-maids handed in their resignations a couple of days later, and all the children that used to play with us never came to Halifax again.

Not all of my visions were that horrible, though. I knew, for example, that my sister Martha would have a son before she even suspected she was with child. However, all of my visions–good or dire– always concerned large-scale or life-changing events.

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Copyright © 2013 Lady T. L. Jennings