All Bedlam Courses Past (part ninety-eight)

All Bedlam Courses Past

Chapter Four

Counterfeits

(part ninety-eight)

His brother had found him eating Mary Paton’s cabbage. With, on the plain table beside the bowl, a chop she’d allowed. “That’s just sat there dried up since breakfast.” He would have stuck it in a pocket, leaving.

Lawrence locked Richard’s arms and hauled him bodily to the door. “I got a word for you, brother. Get someplace else, and don’t be back.”

They were out. Out, and probably never in again. Richard, stumping through woods, choked down a lump…over the loss of his dinner, he thought. He wandered to Dominionville Road, woke from rumination to find it so; hooked onto River Road, and walked to town.

Serendipity was his only faith, a guiding sign to wherever he drifted next. She decided him on the cliff that was Arcadia Rock, that rolled behind Crownhaven’s pavilion to a shelf, a few feet (as Gremot might say) above the plummet and below the summit. Elderberries grew thickety here, tonic and tempting. No one from Ebrach’s kitchen came picking.

At times Richard had gone long without, and was shaking from starvation, he knew of a few such refuges. He could hear a voice barely known, but known. A hoarse, sighing voice, that stirred an old jealousy; in peevish French objecting, conceding, fading, coddled off by a female.

Then, close for a moment and passing, the all-too-known voice of Miss Gremot. “When we open a channel, it’s as though we were in a house with windows on the street. Anyone may be passing by. Anyone may stop and give a message. The divinities, and the waiting spirits, are always with us.”

“Because,” the attendant on her lecture returned, “they are not at peace…the waiting ones.”

A rustle, a hatted head in emphatic nod. “They can’t cross. They can’t become of the divine. If a person dies, if the death was surprising, and the spirit hovers, knows itself to be lost, but can’t find a path, still, it carries its own temperament. Some are spiteful, some are gentle. First, the light. First the spirit sees that the path exists, then if he cannot reconcile, forgive…”

They were gone, her friend much in agreement, murmuring: “How important, yes. Think, to be my age, and unable to let…”

Richard tried a better word than jealous. He could hear melody, a bow plying a single instrument, and his fragile temper snapped at this bait, too. Unwanted and bereaved, he felt, eaten at—by Ebrach’s over-assured protégé, by the sad cello. He hauled weak limbs to the lawn. Fate might supply a fall…

She did not. He gave himself the pleasure of heeling down a strip of wire fence that could never have saved a life. The man whose medicines he’d stolen sat outdoors on a double chair, in smock and naked feet, one foot steeping in a basin of water.

A nurse stood gazing off. Seeing the approach of a ragged man, the patient seized and splashed. Richard watched the nurse think of giving alarm; think again that she could not leave her patient…

On that head of long and whitish blond hair, she sank the dagger of a look.

105

Bedlam

All Bedlam Courses Past (part ninety-nine)

(2024, Stephanie Foster)