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

 

 

 

 

 

All Bedlam Courses Past

 

 

Chapter Eight

Things Relative

 

(part one hundred ninety-two)

 

 

 

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They were at that time, of a burial, where carriages would leave. The family were to stay an hour in a lounge at the Columbia, for acquaintances. Mother and Papa had not turned from watching the diggers shovel. To feel embarrassed that your parents grieved so hard was a fault without answer, and the rain had spat and left them…

Élucide walked from the canopy. She didn’t want to wait in the carriage, but moved for other eyes as though she intended it. Owen came after, giving an arm. When well from earshot, he said: “I was the ruin of her.”

“No need for that. My parents have never gone as far as saying so, either.”

“Either. You were able to read the thought in the air?”

She pursed the smile from her lips. “Careful.”

“I thought I would tell you something. You’ll understand…or you won’t be shocked. If your father had thrown me out twelve years ago, instead of making me work for a living, I’d’ve gone and not come back. I didn’t care to be married when I was twenty, I wouldn’t have made the choice. Ranilde was a rich girl, and I thought it made me something…above, to have her. And we were given the house, the trappings…the dainties, you know my father says, the little pretenses of it all, before she was ill so much, but. You can love a lot about a person, and still, where is the…? Whatever it may be, the nobility, the passion.”

“We aren’t rich, Owen. And I don’t think married people do have those things, very often. You’d want a good friend, wouldn’t you?”

“For half a year I did. Have a sort of giddiness with her. Will you ever marry?”

“No.” In the voice of one who has answered this before. “Women who have property don’t benefit from marriage.”

“Oh.”

“Yes, that. Raise the subject, and I’ll tell you.”

“I was lucky to have loved in innocent times.”

“Shush, shush. Now you’re smiling, and you must not.”

Owen looked at his tie, adjusting. They met Lawrence with Samuel—Samuel at seventeen grown an apt, doughy fit to his stepfather.

“How old was Ranilde?” Lawrence asked.

“She was thirty-one.”

“Mary’s age.”

“No, Dad.”

Clotilde with her children migrated to them slowly. They all looked to the canopy, where Snedden’s men stood by in their tailcoats. Fannie and Uncle George had got further off, were half-turned; the Wellers, barely known to Mother and Papa, but stubborn at their Christian duties, kept vigil.

“No, Mama got to be thirty-three, cause she talked about being the age of martyrdom.”

Bertrand, fourteen, looked Lawrence square in the face. The face, and Samuel’s face, showed only a sharedness, in memory of Mary’s complaints. Bertrand caught Élucide’s eye and shrugged.

Clotilde took her sleeve. “Thirty-three, so sad! I have never met Owen.”

Mariette said (not in French, she had not learned to take social advantage of her first language), “Are we going yet?”

 

 

205

 

 

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Bedlam

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

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

(2025, Stephanie Foster)