All Bedlam Courses Past (part sixty)

All Bedlam Courses Past

Chapter Three

An Object in Motion

(part sixty) 

When it had become surrenderable, clear to him no fourth Progressiste would ever hatch to be embraced by the Americans…

Who owed something to M. de Lafayette, and liked the French, he had always heard; and would not quibble that he was Belgian…how would they tell?

When it had become clear he would accept what Ebrach chose to give—

Ebrach’s charities did not issue from conscience, as M. Sarrazin’s. Ebrach was a Barnum, wanting the best of his collection on show. Or a gardener of rarities, awatch for the once-in-a-blue-moon emergence. Someone soon would die in this house; Ebrach would intercept the flitting soul and bottle it.

As Honoré could survive only for being sheltered, nursed…above all, spent upon, his deathbed clearing of accounts couldn’t matter. Crownhaven’s quiet, orderly ways kept his disease quiet; and orderly, after its fashion. Januaries and Februaries returned their bouts of lethargy and fever. Late Augusts and Septembers, of cool nights and purple horizons, brought a grinding melancholy, a pull towards a road…

Or towards a voyage, or only a dream.

Bertrand seemed a miracle of affectionate trustfulness. A child kept by his guardian too busy at lessons to brood, or too well lied to. But self-possessed…again miraculous, if at seven he pitied this father, loved at once this mother, hadn’t come, for the words of his elders, to see a failure and a simpleton…

It was an old wound, one it did no good, Honoré knew, to salt further. Might Bertrand both enjoy and deserve such ease of entrée. Papa had not helped. He had feared to approach the better classes, useful men he met through M. Sarrazin. He had allowed Honoré to stand silent in a corner, had whipped his head, turned his back, to beg that any service M. Gremot might do be named. Embarrassed even to say it to these men of affairs, this is my son.

In Huy, he had held small office, some appointment of right. Was it to do with cargoes along the river, customs…? Long ago, before the bankruptcy; Honoré and Claudette had not been born, or barely. One day the Dutch King William had wanted to ban the French language from official documents, and Uncle Alain had abandoned the farm, left the country, very abrupt…

A middle son won the tenancy for eight years, and died. Honoré’s father carried his own from inheritance to ruin, through twenty diminishing harvests, as his first children grew to adulthood, and watched their future die.

Every new machine tried, every treatment tested, against insects, blights; every innovation in dousing or strewing, had lured and indebted Papa. Whatever gift for growing a Gremot might have, had passed through the elder line to Alain’s son, who himself held office and farmed. And was not to be fooled, had no sympathy for fools, was not susceptible to fool’s gold.

66

Bedlam

All Bedlam Courses Past (part sixty-one)

(2023, Stephanie Foster)