All Bedlam Courses Past (part one hundred seventy-one)

 

 

 

 

 

All Bedlam Courses Past

 

 

Chapter Seven

Can’t Leave for Staying

 

(part one hundred seventy-one)

 

 

 

---

 

 

 

He let this sit a second. “Lawrence might turn up…danger’s high if he runs across Miss Gremot.”

“I don’t mind if she visits.”

“Oh, don’t you?”

Richard fiddled with the lamp, stymied, hurt. He needed to have an upper hand with his father, play this comedy so the ugliness of tending the old man stayed the trappings of a stage set. The punchline would become his thieving, his loss of looks, his dirt and degradation, items any partisan of Miss Gremot’s would call her attention to.

He sat on his bed of blankets, and leafed the Abstainer.

 

 

Drink

 

A ballad, by James MacFaraday, Esq.

 

Somewhere shines down a pallid moon,

Her beams a hovel flooding o’er

Broken panes her rays probe through,

To limn a bundle in a corner

A mist of breath, from a whiskered snout —

’Tis the starving husk of a faithful hound

 

Does the creature repose next another ragged heap?

Is this shanty-house all but abandoned?

Was the animal spurned and kicked on the road?

Or, loyal of heart,

(As cruel men aren’t)

Does he hew to his post and his family?

 

A brave, gutt’ring glow, from a candle-end’s wick,

’Lumes a sunken-cheeked body, unstirring —

Nay! Here are two, wretched mother and girl;

Of breath hath the elder, tho’ fading

The frozen babe stiff’ning in arms that cling fiercely,

Has lisped her last words, “Oh, Mama, where is he?”

 

Who is he? Richard wondered, this MacFaraday, Esquire. And to what tune could his ballad…so many breaks and changes…ever be sung? Its ample lines on their three pages were bordered by a black design, of trellised roses in grudging bloom; grim Protestant roses, whose thorns must be felt by the reader enduring to the tale’s end.

 

 

183

 

 

---

Bedlam

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

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

(2024, Stephanie Foster)