Farewell and adieu unto you, Spanish ladies
Farewell and adieu to you ladies of Spain
For we have received orders to sail to old England
We hope in a short time to see you again

19th May, 1888 — The beach at the Sanditon, at this event

The anxiousness with which she was awaiting news about the teaching position at Hogwarts had brought her right back to the days spent in anticipation of her OWL and NEWT results, a relentless season of biting her nails down to mutilated stubs. Speaking of seasons, however, it was nearly summer. Which meant the Welsh weather had been persistently wet. Irvingly had been rather better, recently, but Carmelina had been restless even in the sunshine there.

But she had heard that the Sanditon was opening for the season, and decided - well, now was as good a time as any. A weekend away would do to keep her mind churning over what the Hogwarts governors might be discussing at this very moment, or indeed what she would do with herself next if she did not get the job. Go back to her old life, she supposed. It would be different without Walter. But she would cope. She had, after all, found her feet out there - on digs and doing research - for herself, eventually!

The boardwalk had not kept her attention long. Instead, Carmelina had descended to the beach. Even with its warming spells, Sussex was not quite the same as the Mediterranean, the islands of Greece or the beaches of Turkey, its sands a shallow sight compared to the deserts of Egypt. It felt decidedly more English, surrounded by people in their English fashions, licking ice creams, building sandcastles, dipping their toes hesitantly in the water -

It was rather sweet, though, all of it, with a refreshing breeze rolling over from the sea and rustling through the folds of her clothes (and coaxing more flyaway curls of her hair into her face with every passing minute) as she leant against a rock looking out across the beach. Journal in her grasp and tongue caught between her teeth, Carmelina had distracted herself from her original purpose and taken up drawing one of the nearby guests in careful strokes of chalk and pencil. She supposed she ought to be drawing landscapes, as ladies did - or a still life, something she was better practised at from her work - but she had been determined to capture a particularly expressive face; in alternating her gaze between her page and her covert subject, she hadn't realised quite how obviously she was staring. Her eyes had been on her drawing for the past few minutes, utterly engrossed, which was possibly why she hadn't noticed anyone approach her rock until they were at her shoulder.

As it was, a voice spoke out of the blue; Carmelina started, nearly slipping off the rock in shock, her journal dropping unceremoniously onto the sand.

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With ice cream had and the boring pleasantries taken care of, Louisa had found herself needing some time to herself. While she did quite enjoy the social scene at times, she found she quite enjoyed her solitude as well. Her mother had accompanied her but had decided she'd rather sit on a bench near the beach instead of to actually wander along it with her daughter. She was still close enough to be seen though so still respectable per propriety's standards.

She hadn't meandered far when she took note of a couple of other young ladies clearly in some sort of heated discussion. She couldn't help but to shake her head slightly with a small smirk on her features knowing full well the young woman known for making overly exaggerated facial expressions when she told her likely made up stories. She, however, apparently hadn't been the only one to take note of them.

Making her way toward the woman with a sketch pad who had been staring at the group, she noticed that she was actually capturing quite the likeness of the lady in question. Except for the nose, it didn't seem quite right. But perhaps that was because she'd seen Miss Facial Expression up close before. "The nose isn't quite right," she said simply, glancing over the woman's shoulder at the sketch up to the lady again, "It's actually a bit more like she's pressed it against a glass. More flat."

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Lovely Lady Set!

Carmelina hastily snatched up her slipped sketchbook and steadied herself against the rock again, head swivelling to see who had spoken to her. A young woman - perhaps still a girl - with such charming blue eyes set against pretty dark hair that she wished she’d picked a different subject, and brought watercolours with her to boot.

The stranger had been startlingly matter-of-fact about her drawing, too; once Carmelina had gotten her bearings back, and reoriented her page the right way, she squinted from it over to the subject across the beach.

“Oh, you have a good eye,” Carmelina replied cheerfully, not offended by the remark. She smudged out the pencil line she’d had for the nose with her thumb, altering the curve of the girl’s nose to something more snub. “Any better?” She inquired, hoping her drawing inspector hadn’t wandered off in the moment she’d looked away.

“What on earth do you think they’re talking about?” She added, scratching the tip of her nose thoughtfully with the end of the pencil. It felt rather a shame she couldn’t lip-read: the whole group of them seemed in the midst of something interesting. Perhaps the blue-eyed beauty knew them.

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Louisa couldn't help but to smile at the woman when she didn't appear to be offended by her remarks but instead took them in good stride. She watched as the woman made her adjustment on the page before showing it back to her again. She leaned over a bit to look closely at it before continuing to smile and giving her a nod. "Quite," she answered before her attentions were drawn back to the group of girls.

"Oh I'm sure it's some long winded story about a run in with a supposed gentleman," she said with a smirk, "See, the girl you've drawn is quite well known for her over exaggerated stories. But the other two, well, they don't attend many functions due to their mother's failing health so they'll hang onto every word she has to say simply to live vicariously through her." And though she spoke rather matter of factly, there was no coldness indicating any dislike or malice toward the girls. She just knew them personally so it was easy enough to know exactly how things were going down.

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Lovely Lady Set!

Carmelina laughed as the young lady gave her a fuller and more well-informed answer than she had expected; she clearly did know them all, then, or else she had a vivid imagination and a great appetite for gossip. (Not that any of those options was worse than the other. Carmelina had always liked a good story.)

"Ah, I see," she returned, still chuckling at knowing this backstory as she peered over at the girls again (perhaps forgetting a little to be entirely discreet about it). Her gaze did slide back to the girl at her side soon enough, finding her own company just as intriguing as that she'd been observing. "A supposed gentleman, you say?" She prodded further, a teasing twinkle in her eyes as though she wanted to hear more. She could imagine fairly decently for herself the sort of tale the girl was spinning over there, for her audience to be so impassioned at hearing it.

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Louisa's attentions had been drawn to the other girls as the artist looked in their direction as well. Miss Storyteller was still going at it and the sisters were watching with widened eyes. Louisa couldn't help but to laugh at it. She often found herself pulled into such conversations so she wasn't able to sit back and watch such things from a distance often. It was actually a bit of fresh air to not be involved with such things.

"Very likely," she said with a nod as she turned back to the woman, "Though, if he does truly exist I can promise he is far exaggerated to something that he isn't actually in reality. She likes to embellish things so that the smallest of detail is quite the opposite of what it was." Louisa shrugged then, however, as if it hardly mattered to her. "The stories can be rather fun to listen to at times though," she added, "Better than the usual things you often hear within society circles anyways."

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Lovely Lady Set!

"They do sound horribly entertaining," Carmelina admitted, in agreement; possibly even funnier if one knew, like this girl, any divergent truths behind the extravagantly-spun story.

"I've been quite distantly removed from most society circles for a decade or so," she confessed next - not that she had ever been, she suspected, precisely in the same circles as those posh young girls appeared to be, and she hadn't spent long as a debutante herself before withdrawing to be a governess, even before marrying and throwing herself in archaeology - "but," she teased again, "you're almost making me rather sorry to have missed it all."

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Louisa shrugged. They could be entertaining to an extent but were still the type she tried to only take in small doses. Any more than that and she'd be bored to tears. She preferred to avoid it wherever possible, truth be told. But she was, however, quite interested when the woman said she had been out of the social scene for a decade. A brow was raised to show such.

"Oh?" she asked, the interest evident in her tone as well, "For any particular reason?"

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Lovely Lady Set!

"Oh," Carmelina said, as chatty as usual and with no qualms about telling the young woman on the beach her life story although they'd only met minutes ago, "my husband was a cursebreaker, and I studied ancient runes, so we spent most of our time abroad on excavations." She kicked her feet casually in the sand, the beach bringing her back to the dustier sort of dirt and sand they'd been used to sifting through.

"As friendly as the locals and our little band of scholars were, even if one were being kind, I don't think we'd have been called much of a society," she said, trailing off as her smile stretched into a laugh.

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Louisa watched the woman, listened to her words and tried to imagine such things. What she wouldn't give to be able to travel in such a way. She longed for it, truly, but she doubted it would ever be anything that she saw. She was an upper class woman, one of pure blood. She was meant to be a wife. Nothing more.

"It all sounds...Exhilarating," she said with an almost wistful expression and a tone to match. Her gaze had fallen to the sea beyond the beach they were standing at. Being the daughter of a man who owned quite the shipping company, she felt as if the salt waters of the ocean ran through her veins. That was where she wished to be.

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Lovely Lady Set!

“Well,” Carmelina replied, as though it weren’t all that. “It’s even less glamorous than it sounds,” she assured her with a smile of jest, because she doubted it sounded glamorous at all. Perhaps that was the appeal, for a young lady who’d perhaps never had dirt under her nails, toiled from dawn to dusk or haggled hopelessly at a foreign market.

“Have you travelled much, yourself?” She asked in return, because being a young flower of society did not rule such a thing out: as far as Carmelina imagined, it must be all shopping for gowns in Paris one day and coffee in Rome the next, fanciful hotel suites in Spain and spas in Germany, never mind the rest. Or perhaps that was married life, what a young lady like the raven-haired doll before her had to look forward to as a leisurely honeymoon. Carmelina hardly knew!

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Louisa responded with a slight shrug of her shoulders. Glamorous or not, it still sounded exciting. Still sounded like something she'd much rather be doing than that of the stuff social events and dances she had to parade around at. And she imagined the men one met on such things were far more entertaining than that of the ones found on the social circuit she was used to.

"I haven't, unfortunately," she said with a shake of her head in response to the woman's questions, "My father owns a shipping company, one of the largest in Britain. But it's hardly a place he'd want his only daughter being around." There was a hint of bitterness to her voice as she spoke, clearly a girl that didn't like the idea of being kept from it all.

"I'd love to travel some day though," she added, almost wistfully that time, her blue eyes moving away from the sea horizon to look back to the other woman with a faint smile on her lips.

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Lovely Lady Set!

"Oh, no, quite right of him, too," Carmelina said, her smile a little pitying, because she could tell that it disappointed the girl. "There's certainly something about being near the sea," she admitted, anyway, her gaze drifting towards the tide too. "And I don't doubt a resourceful young woman like yourself," and here she grinned at the girl, not sure whether she was overstepping in her impressions, "won't find a way someday to see whatever of the world she likes."

"But I'm sure you've heard all sorts of stories," Carmelina put in, looking for the positive spin of the family's background in the meantime, "and it seems to me that stories are almost as interesting as the real thing." She jerked her pencil at the girl they'd been talking about and she'd been drawing, letting out a chuckle and thinking she was being fairly subtle about it. Apparently not, for the young woman whose face was etched onto her page turned, at a friend's urging, and sent a piercing glare across the beach at Carmelina and her newfound acquaintance. Carmelina's eyes widened guiltily, pressing her mouth into a not-quite-believable look of innocence. "Oops," she murmured, to the dark-haired girl at her side.

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Louisa nodded in response. She'd find a way somehow to get to go on some adventures and see some of the sights she'd only heard of through the tales of her father and brothers. That was, if she could find a gentleman that liked such things and was actually wanting to take a wife. The two didn't often go hand in hand, at least not from her experiences. And, quite frankly, she hated the idea of being a simple society wife constantly stuck at home and going to stuffy events.

Laughing lightly at the woman's words, she didn't think twice of the fact that they'd been found out by the other girl. "Don't fret," she said lightly with a shrug, "She'll likely find a way to turn it into some grand tale to tell others." Louisa also knew she wouldn't dare to say a word against her. She had a bit of a bite herself and wouldn't hesitate on putting the storyteller in her place if needed.

"I suppose I should be on my way though," she added as she turned a smile back to the other woman, "I hope you enjoy your time here." With a slight nod of her head as a farewell, she slowly turned away to go in search of her mother and to find out what was next on their agenda.

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Lovely Lady Set!