Questioning the Lady Abigail.

I’ve been giving some thought to the phrase ‘The Lady Abigail.’

(The reason must be obvious, so I won’t risk the assault-by-overripe-tomatoes again.)

I’m in a quandary, you see. Part of my mind thinks it’s a rather splendid epithet, but yet another part of the same mind suspects a hint of incongruity. The problem is this:

I don’t really think of Abigails as being Ladies, as such. I think of them more as the interesting but slightly spooky daughters of Midwestern farmsteads stuck in hazardous isolation twenty miles from the nearest neighbour and shoved up close to some creepy forest in which anything might lurk and probably does!

Deep breath.

So, the question is: does ‘The Lady Abigail’ survive the suspicion of being an oxymoron? And, furthermore, would it be appropriate to the demure, interesting, artistic, slightly off-beam and rather lovely Sarah – she whose raven hair and fair skin suggest the possibility of Gaelic ancestry somewhere back along the road?

(She’s going to want an explanation for this the next time I see her, and if you think I’m going to attempt an answer in a blog post, think again. I’m not quite that mad. Yet.)

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And on the subject of creepy forests, I’ll soon be posting the latest story to have gone into print, over at the other blog. It’s called Hand in Hand and is about creepy goings on in a creepy forest. The accountant gets it. It has a thinly veiled anti-grey subtext - with plenty of fear and a little blood. Yay. And his wife is definitely no Abigail!