Page 64 of Darkest at Dusk
* * *
Harrowgate, 7 April 1831
* * *
My dearest Rhys,
You must come home at once.
Our little Ned is gone. They found his cap by the willow and then—oh! my hand shakes, and I cannot be plain—Mr. Baines waded in and brought him out. The rector will speak to you when you arrive. The hour is not yet fixed. Will is distraught and will not be parted from me. Your father says he has written the schoolmaster; do not wait for a reply.
I cannot put the particulars here. They will keep until I can look at you. Only come.
* * *
Your loving Mother
* * *
Isabella set the letter down and pressed two fingers to her brow. Her vision blurred. She blinked hard and only then realized her jaw hurt from clenching. Ned. She recalled his name from the previous letter. She could see the willow without meaning to, its long green fronds combing the current like a woman dragging her hair. A child’s cap caught. A man wading. A boy borne in his arms like a bundle of wet laundry.
She could not help but see schoolboy Rhys sitting with this letter, a single candle guttering to tallow tears. Another blow he could not set right. She imagined him shoving clothes into a bag with fingers that shook, walking too quickly down a corridor so the others could not look at his face. He had known grief and loss, this man who held himself so still, so calm.
A sound rose in the flue, a hum and tick. The whispers that clung to the edges of perception thinned, then swelled. Isabella did not look up. She reached for the next letter, a feeling of dread suffusing her.
* * *
Harrowgate, 29 September 1831
* * *
My dearest boy,
I have written and torn three letters this day because I do not know how to tell you what I must. Our Will is gone from us.
It began with a cough that would not be stilled. The apothecary sent laudanum, a soothing draught to ease his nights; a few drops in water, no more. He smiled and said he would be brave for me, and he was. By week’s end, the cough gentled and the tightness left his little chest. Catrin—good child—begged to sit with him that I might close my eyes an hour. We kept the curtains drawn and the room as calm as might be. I left her with the lamp turned and the spoon set by, and kissed his temple. I settled in the chair at the foot of his bed. When I woke, the room was very quiet. His lashes lay on his cheek and his breathing grew soft as a kitten’s. So soft, I bent to feel it. He slept, my dear, and he did not wake.
I could not write you before it was done. I wanted to hold him here by word if I could not by hand and you would only have run and missed his breath by a day. The rector is kind. He says the Lord gathers the little ones up and they do not fear. You and I know our Will was not little anymore, but I hope the rector is right about the fear.
I do not know how to be plain. Forgive me.
* * *
Your most affectionate Mother
* * *
The nib had bitten the paper hard in places. The downstrokes were darker than they ought to have been. Isabella touched the ink and imagined it drying, blotched by a mother’s tears. Two sons in one year. The ledger of loss building, line upon line. Rhys had been away at school when sorrow had called him home and sent him out again and called him home once more. Some boys returned to school with longer legs and a new Latin primer. He had returned fewer brothers.
The horror of it crept through her.
Tap…tap…tap, the flue said, distinct, deliberate. The sound unstitched something near her heart. A fine sifting of ash lifted and fell as if the hearth breathed. Steam drifted down the chimney’s throat, a thin fall that kissed the back of her hand and vanished with a hiss. She looked up then and saw the air above the grate shimmer as if heat rose from a fire though there was none. The smell, wet coal and scorched fat, curdled on the back of her tongue.
She reached for the last letter. It was written in a different hand, blunter, stronger. The paper was thicker, the fold exact.
* * *
Harrowgate, 21 January 1832
