141. The Black Dog – Georgena Goff

Lottie moves to this random small town because her boyfriend, Jed, is studying some spiritualist guy named Holme, who is mysterious and maybe, maybe, a fraud. Maybe. Who is to know? Not Lottie, regular human teacher and girlfriend. Jed plants her in the boarding house where Holme tends to show up as her landlady is a disciple of his of a sort and does seances. Jed wants Lottie invited to a seance to see if Holme shows up and she gets the in and Holme totally does show up. He also claims to be possessed by some sort of rude demon.

Anyway, as spiritual conmen usually tend to have charisma, Holme also has charisma. Lottie goes to visit him in his big out of the way house and he’s like totally into her. Jed thinks Holme is a little too into Lottie since Holme maybe brought his own harem of two from “Lancastershire” (as I recall from living there, the county was Lancashire…), but Lottie hasn’t even seen any ladies around. Clearly, ghosts also make dinner for Holme. Eventually, Lottie agrees to help Holme with his apparently abundant typing needs and then they quickly fall in love.

Lottie agrees to marry Holme about 10 seconds after she stops going home and suddenly, he’s a traditional roles guy. Lottie needs to cook. If Lottie’s going to go into the basement, she can take care of those poorly ladies of Lancastershire. It’s a total bait and switch and Lottie’s getting the life sucked out of her for a rich dude’s charisma. If only she’d listened to Jed and also not left her sandals randomly by the lake.

Thorfy would never ask Hen Wen to fulfill a traditional role of any kind. She’s made it clear she does what she wants when she wants like kicking me in her sleep while I was typing.