So Many Partings Excerpt
So Many Partings Excerpt
Prologue
The small boy touched the lips of the man in the rosewood coffin. He knelt reverently beside the waking table and brushed the dead man’s auburn hair back from his waxen cheek.
“Don’t be dead, Da,” he whispered softly. “I don’t know what to do without you.”
There was no answer in the silent and forbidding room.
“I love you. I’ll always love you.” Resignedly, the eight-year old boy nestled his body in against the mahogany coffin rail, and settled to his vigil with a sigh of resolute devotion.
“The house is as much yours as it is theirs, son,” his father had said proprietarily in other days, and the child had nodded in gracious assent, feeling a curious lump in his throat at the knowledge that because of his illegitimacy he was not even permitted inside his own house.
The boy looked intensely at the unfamiliar woman, knowing her to be his grandmother, fascinated by the loathing she exuded toward him.
“I came to stay with me Da, Mrs.” He knew she should be called “Your Ladyship,” but under the circumstances he begrudged her the title.
“Filthy child, how dare you call my son your father! Get out of here before I have you beaten for your audacity.”
“I’ll go, mum but he’s me Da. Shame to you that you left him alone and him just dead. Shame to you.”
He stood defiantly for a moment, leaned down to kiss his father’s icy cheek, and then scampered for the emptied doorway.
The matron stood astonished beside the coffin; she was unused to being defied by any in her own home, and she had instinctive detestation of the peasantry.
“Fool!” she hissed contemptuously at her dead son in the coffin. “Romantic, arrogant fool. We’ll all rue the day you bedded that child’s slut of a mother.”
She turned her back on the lonely coffin and strode from the death room, footsteps echoing down the long marble corridor.
The stillness in the coffin room remained unchanged by her hostility. The embers of the fireplace continued their slow dying, the wind lost none of it’s mournful keen. And Thomas Dalton, small but determined, crept silently back to the box and resumed his vigil at his father’s side.