Lord Hethelwaite’s Party
by TonySpencer
Copyright© 2025 by TonySpencer
Comedy Story: A letter of apology in lieu of an RSVP to a party invitation
Tags: Fiction Historical Humor Workplace Revenge
From
T Braithwaite Esq
“The Sparrow”
West Docks
Liverpool
Lancashire
To
The Right Honourable Lord Hethelwaite
Grand House
Hethelwaite
West Riding
Dated 14th Day of the Month
Your Grace,
I would to thank you sincerely for your most kind invitation that I received from you a week since to your garden party on the 15th inst, to celebrate the launching of your new Formal Gardens of Roses, Exotic Perennials and Annual Flower Beds, including Box-hedged Maze, Water Fountains and especially the initial filling of the new Ornamental Lake to the immediate rear of your recently refurbished Grand House.
Regrettably, Your Grace, I must inform you that my wife Ethel and I are unable to attend at your new garden launch because we are setting sail on the early tide of the 15th for our new life on the western fringes of the free colonies situated across the Atlantic Ocean.
I can speak for myself and the majority of your former tenants, as most are our fellow passengers, as we look forward to swapping the lives of toiling as your poor tenants to the fresh challenges of carving new and vastly larger acreages of freehold farms and what they locally call ranches out of the New Territories in the mid-west Wilderness we expect to find there.
By coincidence, at the very same time that your kind invitations arrived, the General Letter Office delivered to the village Post Office the Parliamentary Proclamation posters announcing the Act of Enclosure of Hethelwaite Common Pasture, where we, and all your former tenants, have previously enjoyed the freedom and ancient rights of grazing our livestock for centuries, the enclosed area to become a vast lake next to the formal gardens that your esteemed Gardener, who was formerly feted for his formal laying out of the Royal Gardens at the King’s Palace in Westminster, has worked on both your gardens and engineering the dam intended to divert water from the river to feed your new lake, these last two years and five months.
Well, we were too busy to reply straight away to your kind invitation until this late hour. After all, it takes a great deal of effort to move all our chattels from the designated-for-imminent-drowning hovels that we rented from you, our flooded fields and commons that will soon be unable to bear fruit, crops or graze our livestock upon ever again, that we felt we might not take the trouble to unload our laden carts until we reached the docks on the night before your planned garden party.
To read the complete story you need to be logged in:
Log In or
Register for a Free account
(Why register?)
* Allows you 3 stories to read in 24 hours.