Persephone's Plight (Book Drawing Submission)

Persephone's Plight
A New book by Betty Kylene.

Persephone Banks slumped onto the park bench. It had been a particularly trying morning as she left her childhood home for the last time. Her parents had been killed in a motor accident 3 months previously and the elegant yet not ostentatious home in Russel Square was let to the Banks family as long as her father was in the employ of the University. Now that he was dead the University needed the home for the next professor of Maths.

For a someone who was so good with numbers Professor Banks had been terrible with money and Persephone had been forced to sell most of her parent's possessions to settle the debts with the butcher, grocer and the bookshop.

Persephone had told the Dean of Mathematics, a kindly but ancient old gentleman who had been her father's confidant that she had some girlfriends that she would be sharing a flat with in Islington. But that was a lie. The truth was she didn't have any girlfriends, she didn't have any family to speak of other than a distant cousin whom she had never met who lived in Amsterdam or The Hague or somewhere in Holland.

Persephone sighed as she picked up her two old fashioned suitcases and walked on across the square. She had an address scratched on a slip of paper that read 53 Swanly Street, which belonged to an employment agency she had found in the telephone directory. She wasn't trained for much, but perhaps she could be a secretary as she was good at typing and she also liked children so perhaps some sort of nanny position. She would inquire at the agency for respectable lodgings for a young lady of modest means. "Very modest." she said to herself as the thought about her very slim pocket book.

The wind was biting through her thin flannel coat and her mouse colored hair was whipping in her face so she started to walk briskly when suddenly the handle of the large valise came loose and broke off. The case fell to the pavement and came open spilling her possessions and giving her a bang on the shin as well. She was scrambling trying to collect her stockings before they blew to the four corners of the world when she saw a dark head of hair and two strong skillful hands pick up her slippers.