THOSE AWAKE... 


By Tessa Harvey


    Lady Rosemary was annoyed, which was not unusual for her, but a little puzzled and afraid, which was out of character. Her husband was away philandering, she presumed, while pursuing questionable business deals. So she no longer had to walk stiffly to hide her bruises. One or two staff sometimes glanced at her a little sharply, as if they knew or guessed something of her husband's strange predilection for other men, but she held her head high.
    Being married as a social convenience had been as deep a betrayal as most most and had hurt immeasurably. To think about it would be to fail and fall into some depthless pit. So Rosie worked her staff hard and herself harder.
    Imelda - was that her name? - had to go. She could not afford useless sympathy, but in some strange way she missed her and her honesty.
The replacement was slatternly, almost openly mocking, dressing carelessly, doing as little as possible. Once or twice Rosie had caught her poking round her office and had sent her packing, ignoring the pitiful excuse of "dusting."
     What really troubled her was not her husband's shaky financial entanglements, nor even her own. It was the strange words she had found in that old Bible book: "Those awake shall soon be silenced." 
    All around her, news of police brutality, people being put in "Facebook jail", all anti-vaccine, anti-government criticism penalised..... the list was becoming endless. "Are we a police state?" she thought, worried. There had been no hidden wills or investments in the book to shore up her own crippling debts. It had been an insane impulse to even steal it and Rosie had paid off her worker with instructions to leave the book on the young man's doorstep.
    But other words in the book came to her in the night hours: "The LORD is my shepherd, I shall not want"... and Rosie remembered the faith of her father.



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