A Rustle of Paper

  Flash Fiction Reader, I was dismayed.   The house was a blackened ruin, bereft of battlements, roof and chimneys. What tragedy had befallen this place? Had my master survived? He who was my equal despite gulfs in age and status. He who had loved me. He who had lied. He who had proposed whilst not free to do so. Reader, I should perhaps have suspected. I had sensed her presence, heard the deranged laughter, witnessed the results of her madness, but it was not until the wed ding day that ‘the impediment’ had been revealed. I had fled that very night, yet the bond could not  be severed. Hence, my return. And now they were telling me that she had been killed and my master horribly injured. I found him at last, mutilated and blind but still as much my dearest love as I, his plain Jane, was his. Reader, I married him.