In Disguise

 

I wrote this piece in response to lilfluff’s prompt “the one where both parties are in disguise …and neither of the love interests realizes that the other is also disguised. Setting: a country inn.”  It came in at only 9,413 words after trying to be longer.  Please pace yourself if necessary.

Note: Louis-Jérôme Gohier was a French politician and contemporary of Napoleon Bonaparte, and this story lies in an alternate timeline to ours.

Worthy Moor was a small village a little off the main road out of the capital and missed by most who travelled that road - unless there had been flooding rain when it was part of the long way around, via Worthy Bottom, Moor Green, and Ox Heath.  It had a village green, a smithy, an inn named The Fat Fox, one shop, and a church dedicated to St Swithin.  It was a small village but there was a vicarage attached to the church.  Three houses and estates belonging to members of the gentry and a little-visited minor property of the Earl of Cheltern rounded out the hamlet.  Through traffic was low, and few strangers came to stay the night, unless there was flooding on the main road.

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