All Bedlam Courses Past (part seventeen)

All Bedlam Courses Past

Chapter One

The Peculiar Nature of Logical Science

(part seventeen)

They went as the new bridge dictated, at a stronger diagonal, wheeling over the burial of Sanderson’s cabin and his father’s, all things built by the county’s founding clan well snuffed. River Road met the stub of Oak Street, the buggy looping onto Liberty Avenue, Miss Towson slowing for this vehicle and that. Richard kept his perch where he might have stepped down.

“Maybe I’ll ask if he’s got some job needs doing.”

“Richard.” A quelling pause. “Myself, or, of course, Dr. Horace, or Mr. Gremot, when he’s down from the capital, it can do no harm to mend fences…”

No, anyone who had known Richard would gladly give him work. They would gladly pay him. He must recognize only that this extension of the charitable hand was a meeting halfway, one that in honor and reason, he must extend himself likewise to meet. It was not going to be a question, Richard, of simply trying Mr. Ebrach when one had exhausted one’s other friends’ limits; of trying the next person, then, when Mr. Ebrach would tolerate no more.

With a rare finesse, during her sermon Miss Towson steered to Crownhaven’s curb and halted. Richard hopped off, smiling up. Honor was in fact not a bad word. It was what she offered him without knowing, and he saluted her in return. His mother wasn’t capable of educating him so well, and his father wouldn’t have bothered.

On the veranda he saw a number of people. Élucide Gremot, and Ebrach’s secretary, together with Mrs. Jerome, and a man of jellyfish complexion, in a smock and baggy drawers, and no visible dismay about his dishabille.

Richard wanted to put his back to this crowd. But not to look an ingrate, not through a pitying shake of Shad’s head, communicate to his father he had been. He muttered, “Help you down, Miss Melvin”; to which, hiking her basket onto an elbow, Shad’s woman answered, “Don’t need you.”

Miss Gremot compelled him with an eye.

He saw there her father’s galvanic gift—the thing that needed doing, the plan for doing it. Her prettiness was another gambit, pawns captured to be snugged at the side of the board, done. Prettiness was commodity, and she knew it; the trafficking of commodity was birthright, birthright the confirmation of a Gremot’s relentless push…and push only the inability to keep hands off things, let them be.

Maybe none of this was true. But he couldn’t think of a time he had known her, when she hadn’t been this grown-up. He ambled townwards, watching behind.

He saw her give a directive to the secretary.

Richard stopped on a sigh, followed the jog down the steps, down a second flight to the bottom of the terrace. He watched the secretary light on a concrete bench…perform for Miss Gremot a lookout at sea, shoot a rude whistle.

His condescension was for life, for all its human cargo, possibly.

19

Bedlam

All Bedlam Courses Past (part eighteen)

(2023, Stephanie Foster)