All Bedlam Courses Past (part one hundred thirty-two)

 

 

 

 

 

All Bedlam Courses Past

 

Chapter Five

Collecting Debts

(part one hundred thirty-two)

 

 

 

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Rowan in the flesh was mottled…the parts that showed, complexion and wire-haired backs of hands. His eyes were prominent, his eartops tufted, the tufts threading along to his chin.

He slued a nose in her direction, shy of focus. “One’at went down to Nashville. Comes home with the all the dug after…” The mental thicket through which he struggled parted to a metaphor. A sotted one.

“Grave robbing. Not suited for a young lady, but Gremots on the hunt don’t hold off, got to get their teeth in…”

Teeth again? She thought for the second time in two years she was being compared to a stoat.

Rowan muttered, “Vanguard starts up.”

“Mr. Rowan,” Fannie said. “I’m sorry your friend troubled you to visit when you weren’t feeling well. May I have Ellen show you to the garden? There’s a little shelter there for sitting. In the fresh air.”

“I wouldn’t have said grave robbing,” Yeager told Élucide.

“Completely true. For a cause. I did other things in Nashville.” She pinched his sleeve and drew him aside. “Can I tell you a little fact?”

“Now, Miss, I never did see him take a drink. We walked from town and the exercise must have pumped it up out of his blood.”

His theory was a novelty, but she shushed him. “Mr. Rowan’s a ringer for Moult Buckley. Do you know who I mean?”

Yeager put his head back in a recognizing way.

“And don’t be crude. Eats. You’re in Mrs. Rutherford’s house.”

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

141

 

 

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iii.

What’s asked for

 

 

Their cook had a story, a father born in Haiti who had known Mr. Lincoln’s Haitian barber. Rowan, once, tickling Ysonde to death, had taken this down for the Beacon. The clipping hung framed on the kitchen wall.

Her source of pride, and that she had family in Ohio, that her brother had ten acres and had built two houses on them, hadn’t put anyone in mind of her leaving. Wanting off her feet, at the age of…

Seventy, at least.

“And so…?”

A sharp look up. “I hope the Crownhaven people, whatever their manners are, find one another charming.”

“Who will you get?”

“Ysonde is not going to her brother at once. They have homemaking classes at the college. One of the girls will want training in a real household.”

This real of Mother’s stood in opposition. To a daughter’s doing office jobs among the spiritualists. Mother’s peeve straddled a certain fence, able to tax Élucide as well with not lobbying for college at seventeen or eighteen, when her parents would have smiled and shaken their heads, so that her career today might be as a teacher or a nursemaid. Or housekeeper, capital H.

She didn’t apologize, then, for prompting her mother.

 

 

 

 

 

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Bedlam

All Bedlam Courses Past (part one hundred thirty-three)

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

(2024, Stephanie Foster)