Robin the Wild Fledgling: Prologue, Part 1

 Prologue, Part 1

The sun was barely up, the rolling hills of Henford-on-Bagley had recently been liberated from winter’s gloom, and the trees in the village of Finchwick were just beginning to show their buds. Inside one of the cottages that lined Finchwick’s cobbled streets, a young woman brushed a wisp of her long ginger hair away from her freckle-dotted cheek as she opened her bedroom door and then shut it behind her as she hurried into the cottage’s cozy living area. She was making her way to the front entrance when another door creaked as it opened behind her, and a stern male voice spoke up. “You’re late for your paper route, Penny. You should have left before Chanticleer crowed. Our neighbours will want to have time to relax a bit and read the paper before they need to prepare for church.”

Penny tried to conceal her frustration as she turned around to face the middle-aged man who scrutinized her, his brow furrowing with severity — and a hint of worry. “I know, Father. I’m on my way now.”

Penny’s father’s expression softened slightly, and he gave a nod of approval. “Very good. Just stay away from the Bramblewood while you’re out and about. You might get lost in that tangled wildwood and never be heard from again, or you might eat a poisonous mushroom, or you might run afoul of Odd Todd, the wicked warlock who lives in the depths of the wood —”

A middle-aged woman who had the same hair color and freckles as Penny emerged from her and her husband’s bedroom, carrying a neatly folded hand-knitted cardigan sweater. “Now, dear,” she said to her husband, “you know it’s not uncommon for our neighbours to go for a stroll in The Bramblewood from time to time. And perhaps you’re being a bit unfair to poor old Alder Todd. I’ve never actually met the fellow — not many people here have seen him in person, since he keeps to himself so much — and he may have a few bats in his belfry, but he’s been living out there ever since you and I were children and he’s never bothered anyone, so I think we would know by now if he were dangerous.”

“But Priscilla, dear, what about Virginia Payne’s latest tale? She’s been telling everyone in town about how her daughter Amelia took the risk of going for a walk in the Bramblewood, when the girl happened to encounter the sorcerer, and no sooner had she looked into his serpentine eyes than he turned her into a porcelain rabbit! I have half a mind to interview Virginia and Amelia about this and publish the story in the Sentinel in order to warn the town.”

“Percival,” Priscilla chided her husband, “Virginia may be a good friend of mine, but you know just as well as I do that she has a habit of stretching the truth in order to fabricate a more interesting rumour to spread around Henford-on-Bagley. It’s unlike you to believe such nonsense, and you have too much integrity as a journalist to put it in print, especially since anyone can see that Amelia Payne is not a porcelain rabbit.”

Percival paused awkwardly for a moment. “She got better.”

Priscilla bustled over to her daughter, threw the cardigan over Penny’s back and shoulders and stuffed her arms into the sleeves. “Anyhow, dearie, you’ll catch your death of cold if you go outside on a morning like this without a nice warm cardigan.”

“Thank you, Mum,” Penny replied. She leaned towards her mother and gave her a peck on the cheek, then she went over to her father and gave him a slightly strained peck on the cheek as well. “I’m a grown woman now, Father. You don’t need to treat me like a child anymore.”

“We know, but you’re still our only daughter, and your father and I can’t help but worry sometimes,” Priscilla replied on her husband’s behalf. “Now, off you pop. We’ll see you at the church after you’ve finished your paper route.”

“Thank you again, Mum.” With that, Penny hurried across the living area and out of the front door before her father had a chance to say anything else.

As Penny crossed her parents’ yard, she paused for a few seconds to glance over the fence around the chicken enclosure. “Good morning, Chanticleer. Good morning, Henrietta,” she greeted her parents’ black rooster and white hen. Then she went on her way out of the front gate, got on a bicycle that was leaning up against the stone wall that surrounded her parents’ house, and cycled away around the neighborhood community garden and down the road towards Finchwick Square. However, she didn’t stop at any of the shops or market stalls — even if she wanted to do some shopping, the stores and stalls were closed. Instead, she went to a small building tucked away in a corner with a sign that read “Finchwick Weekly Sentinel” out front. She unlocked the door with a spare key her father had given her years ago when she first began helping out with his business by running a paper route, ducked inside, and picked up a stack of newspapers sitting on a table waiting for her next to a ball of twine and a pair of scissors. She rolled each newspaper up, cutting a piece of twine for each newspaper and tying them in their rolls. Then she brought the newspapers outside, locked the door behind her, got on the bike again, and took off. She cycled around Finchwick, tossing a newspaper onto the doorstep of every home, and then she crossed the town’s bridge that spanned the River Bagley and headed away from town onto the dirt roads that curved across the hills. She delivered a newspaper to the house that Doctor Charles Payne Sr. had built for his family at 3 Olde Mill Lane on land that the Watson family sold to him, and then she delivered a newspaper to Olde Mill Hill, ancestral home of the Watson family themselves. Now that she was done with her deliveries, she turned her bicycle around and headed back down the road towards Finchwick.

When Penny arrived back in the village, she bicycled through Finchwick’s town square, and then she parked her bicycle at the side of the road outside of an old stone chapel located just down the street from her parents’ cottage. It wasn’t an unusual occurrence for Percival Primrose, staunch Jacoban that he was, to complain that the chapel’s architecture was too “high church” for his taste and to express his opinion that somebody ought to remove the gargoyles from the roof and the statues from the small garden to the side of the building, but Penny had always thought that the old chapel looked like something out of a romantic fairy tale, and she often imagined herself getting married to some fantastical prince charming there.

Penny entered the church and looked around for her parents. It wasn’t hard for her to find them; Percival always had their family sit in the same pew conspicuously located towards the front of the chapel, so that the rest of the townsfolk could bear witness to the laudable piety of their local newspaper owner and his family. Doctor Charles Payne Jr. was seated a few rows behind them with his wife Virginia Payne, who was Henford-on-Bagley’s local schoolteacher, and their daughter Amelia. Penny went and scooted into the pew next to her parents. Priscilla smiled at her daughter. “Hello, dearie,” she whispered. “How was your paper route?”

“The same as ever,” Penny whispered back.

“Ladies,” Percival cautioned his wife and daughter, “the service is about to start.”

Penny sat back in her pew and mentally steeled herself for the remainder of the same boring old Sunday morning that she went through every week. Which would in turn be followed by the same boring old Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, Friday and Saturday that she went through every week. There seemed to be no sign of change on the horizon in sleepy old Henford-on-Bagley.

Later that night, when everyone in the Primrose household was supposed to be asleep, Penny’s bedroom window quietly slid open. Penny surreptitiously climbed out of the window and onto a small ledge just underneath it. She was carefully carrying a wooden easel that was spattered with dried paint folded up under one arm, along with a small blank canvas. She carried a picnic basket full of tubes of paint on her other arm. She crept along the ledge, past the window of her parents’ bedroom where both of them were fast asleep. There was a trellis lining the ledge at the back of the house, but one section of the trellis had broken off above the ledge, making a perfect ladder for Penny to climb down. After climbing off of the ledge, she snuck over to where she had parked her bicycle, propped up the folded easel and the canvas in the basket of the bicycle as best she could, and quickly pedaled off into the night.

When Penny reached the edge of the Bramblewood, she took a look around to make sure there was no one around to see her, and then she biked down a path that led into the forest. The full moon that gave her enough light to see by — and paint by — cast an otherworldly glow upon the woods. Even with a wintry nighttime chill still clinging to the air and the plants not quite blooming yet, Penny couldn’t help but think that the wildwood looked like the setting of a fairy tale. She made her way to the edge of the river Bagley, to a spot that looked out onto the ruins of a castle on an island in the middle of the river, and a waterfall cascading down the cliffs behind it. She set up her easel and canvas, got out her paints, and began to paint the moonlit landscape.

The moon gradually rose higher into the sky as Penny worked on her painting. As she painted, she thought to herself about how frustratingly overprotective her father was, and how she felt trapped in boring old Henford-on-Bagley, where sneaking out to the Bramblewood in the middle of the night was her only chance at having any kind of excitement in her life. If only this forest really was the setting for a fairy tale, maybe a handsome prince would come to rescue the princess from the tyrannical king who kept her locked in a tower, and then the prince and princess would fall madly in love with each other, and he would take her with him on all sorts of adventures…

The sound of rustling in the underbrush from behind her startled her out of her fantasies. She paused her painting for a moment and looked around. Maybe it was the warlock everyone in town gossiped about… but no, there was no one in sight. She resumed her painting, but half a minute later, the sound of a snapping twig from down the path startled her again. She turned to look in the direction of the sound, half-expecting to see a sinister silhouette creeping towards her.

However, instead of a wizened old warlock, an attractive young man sauntered around a bend in the trail. He stopped when his blue eyes caught sight of Penny and her painting, and he paused for a moment, scrutinizing the canvas. “What is that?” It was clear from the sound of his accent that he was a foreigner — one who came from another Simlish-speaking country, but a foreigner nonetheless.

“What is what? Do you mean my painting?”

“Oh, so you Henford-on-Bagley country bumpkins call a stained canvas a painting? Different strokes for different folks, I guess.”

“How rude!” Penny exclaimed. “Who do you think you are, sir?!”

“Clark Faulkner, the classy and cosmopolitan globetrotting travel journalist extraordinaire,” he introduced himself. “Soon you’ll be able to brag to all your little country girl friends that you were lucky enough to have a chance meeting with me before I became famous.”

Penny put her hands on her hips and scowled at the audacious interloper. “Excuse me, did I hear you call yourself classy? People with real class have manners.”

“And what would a backwoods girl who can’t even paint know about class?”

Before Penny could come up with another retort, an old man with shoulder-length hair, a pointy beard, and glowing green eyes that were slitted like a reptile’s popped out of the nearby underbrush. Penny gasped in horror as she realized this must be the infamous Odd Todd. The old man was holding a long, narrow stick in his hand, and he immediately started waving it around in the air, then pointed it at Clark and shouted “Infatuate!” A burst of glowing, sparkling energy flew from the tip of the stick and struck Clark, causing a similarly glowing and sparkling aura to appear around him. All of a sudden, Penny was filled with an inexplicable, irresistible compulsion to wrap her arms around Clark and press his lips against his. The two of them kissed each other as Alder Todd ran away through the woods, giggling like a mischievous schoolboy.

When Clark and Penny finally pulled away from their kiss, Clark gave another quick glance back to the painting in progress, then returned his gaze to Penny’s brown eyes. “Y’know, now that I’ve gotten a better look at how pretty you are — em, I mean, how pretty your painting is — I figure I shouldn’t have snubbed your work. You have real potential as an artist. Too bad that potential’s wasted in a place like this, where the only thing most folks know about is farming. And there’s one more thing you were r-ri-riiiiigh….” Clark cleared his throat; in spite of his newfound romantic feelings for the woman he had only just met and had been arguing with until that weird old man showed up, he still couldn’t bring himself to say the words ‘there's one more thing you were right about.’ “Anyway, where are my manners? I don’t even know your name.”

“I’m Penelope Primrose,” she introduced herself. “Mr. Faulkner, did you mention earlier that you’re a journalist? My father is a journalist as well; he runs our local newspaper, the Finchwick Weekly Sentinel. I must say, travel journalism sounds like a very exciting profession. What faraway places have you been to? How often does your work bring you to Henford-on-Bagley? And what brings you to the Bramblewood so late at night?”

“Woah, woah, slow down, Miss Primrose. I can only answer one question at a time.” Clark paused for a moment to take a deep breath. “Well, I’m fairly new to the job and I haven’t had many assignments yet,” he admitted, “so I’ve never been here before. My work put me up in a rental cottage near the edge of this forest in the middle of nowhere, and I couldn’t sleep, so I decided to go for a walk. Unfortunately, my bosses at the San Myshuno Times don’t send rookie travel journalists to the glamorous destinations that everyone wants to visit, like Tartosa or Sulani. I’ve been to Selvadorada, which I admit is a beautiful place full of adventure, but roughing it in the jungle is really not my thing. Still, I’ve gotta go where my bosses send me in order to work my way up the ladder and earn the best assignments.”

“You absolutely must tell me all about San Myshuno and Selvadorada,” Penny gushed. "I’m dying to learn more about everything outside of Henford-on-Bagley. I wish I could travel the world as well.”

“Well, for this assignment, I’m thinking I could really use an assistant — y’know, one of the locals to show me around, preferably someone who’s in the know about what’s going on around here because she’s related to the guy in charge of the village newspaper. Tell you what, I’ll make you a deal: if you help me out, I’ll tell you all about living in San Myshuno and visiting Selvadorada. And I’ll make sure you get a cut of my earnings for this assignment too, as fair payment. Whaddaya say?”

Penny smiled shyly at Clark — working with him meant she would have more chances to see him before he went back to San Myshuno. And if she was lucky, maybe she could combine her pay from that job with her pay from her job helping the family business, along with whatever she could scrape together from selling her paintings in order to move away from Henford-on-Bagley and follow Clark to the big city. She’d probably need to sell her bicycle too; there was no way she’d be able to fit that thing in a suitcase and heft it all the way to San Myshuno. “That would be wonderful, Mr. Faulkner.”

“Please, call me Clark.”

“Of course, Clark. Then you may call me Penny.”

Meanwhile, deeper in the Bramblewood, Alder Todd slowed his pace to a leisurely walk. “I believe I have run far enough that any potential pursuers would have lost my trail by now,” he said out loud to nobody in particular. “Of course, that high-and-mighty Yank and the daughter of that self-righteous journalist are most likely too preoccupied jousting with their lips to give chase.” Then he whistled sharply and called out “Lord Wifflefluff!”

A corgi with a white, brown, orange and red coat and a single horn spiraling out of his forehead came running up the forest path in response to the call.

“Ah, there thou art,” the warlock said nonchalantly to his unicorgi familiar. “Come, let us return home. I must needs awaken early tomorrow morning in order to shear Lloyd’s wool and begin knitting a lovely tea cozy from it. My favorite great-nephew made an honourable proposal of marriage to his lady as of late, and I ought to offer them a truly heartfelt gift at their wedding.”