Frock Coat Dreams
Romances, Nightmares, and Fancies from the Steampunk Fringe
by J. Daniel Sawyer
AWP Steampunk
A division of ArtisticWhispers Productions
Copyright © 2012 J. Daniel Sawyer
All Rights Reserved
Train Time © 2008 J. Daniel Sawyer, first published in Sculpting God, 2008
Sleep, Walk © 2011 J. Daniel Sawyer
Angels Unawares © 2005 J. Daniel Sawyer, first published in Sculpting God, 2008
Cold Duty © 2009 J. Daniel Sawyer, first published in Steampod, 2009
On Matters Most Austere © 2010 J. Daniel Sawyer
A Goblet of Fifty-Three © 2011 J. Daniel Sawyer
Book Design by ArtisticWhispers
Digital painting “The Lady in the Park” © 2010 J. Daniel Sawyer
Distributed by Smashwords
This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, events, and locations are fictitious or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons or events, living or dead, are entirely coincidental.
This file is licensed for private individual entertainment only. The book contained herein constitutes a copyrighted work and may not be reproduced, stored in or introduced into an information retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means (electrical, mechanical, photographic, audio recording, or otherwise) for any reason (excepting the uses permitted to the licensee by copyright law under terms of fair use) without the specific written permission of the author.
Frock Coat Dreams
Romances, Nightmares, and Fancies from the Steampunk Fringe
by J. Daniel Sawyer
Table of Contents
Cold Duty: Selected Readings from the Diaries of a Gelusian Repairman
Train Time
For Wendy
Tap, tap, tap.
The cane foot tapped measuredly on the plank, hammering out a steady tick-tock rhythm. It was not a rubber foot, such as had been common on cane-feet for a century now, but a proper pinned steel cane foot, suitable for a weapon or a prop to lean on or a scepter with which to gesticulate. It kept its clock-like rhythm even as a steam engine pulled out of the station, a few feet from the bench where its owner sat in his frock coat and top hat, measuring the minutes in percussive time.
The late afternoon summer was dry and hot, save for the oppressive blasts of humidity that coated the ticket window with fog for a few brief moments when a locomotive deigned to grace the lonely platform with its presence. The endless in-between times stretched on like the deep-split grain of the wooden planks that seemed to continue uninterrupted from one floorboard to the next. Across the double-tracks, past the far platform, flies and weevils swarmed above the autumn grain, taking from it what pickings they could before the harvest.
It was the last day of summer. Soon the dust would rise from the fields and the northern world would hunker down for a winter season that was comfortable and warm, circumscribed by brick and fiberglass, hearths long since replaced by electric heaters. The days when people froze to death for want of wood, or heating oil, or gas were well gone, but the anachronistic frock coat and cane went seemingly unnoticed on the forgotten railway line, where steam power serviced the nostalgic aging population whose automated homes drew nuclear power from the worldwide grid. The coming months would be a time of hibernation for Europe, but neither the cold slow yearly death the old world had endured, nor the slowed down fallow time of the new world, were in the future of this man from out the storybooks of Conan Doyle or the misty streets of Whitechapel. And yet for all his out-of-place formality, the bench he sat on was wrought iron, and the foot of his cane kept perfect time. He seemed a fixture in the weatherbeaten station.
The steel band left small indentations in the old, gray oak, and the cane's wielder was beginning to regret his promise to await the train from Bonn. It had seemed like a good idea at the time, it had seemed the most natural thing in the world. Leaving Gibraltar, they each had business to attend to, loose ends of past lives to tie up before they embarked together for the new frontier. She could have flown in, of course, the airport was near enough from their ship's moorings. Or she could have driven, but somehow, even back in Morocco, the steam train had seemed best. It had seemed fitting that they leave their old world behind in its proper style, and the Orient Express and a few of the other remaining locomotives on the planet ran right past their destination.
So, it had been settled. They had kissed goodbye with promises to meet in two months. There had been chats, and vid calls, and letters, and every other sort of communication that was available to them, and when they got busy and went without each other for a few days or a week, their reconnection was that much sweeter for the absence. She was a hunger for him, as real as his need for meat and far more dearly sought, while he was to her like water. That's what she had said, over and over again.
Tap. Tap. Tap.
That was what she had said, and he had believed her. But he had been here, waiting on the Orient Express, its last run of the summer, for two days. It had been delayed, there had been no word. Perhaps a mechanical breakdown had stranded it in a high pass - but he discarded the notion as soon as it occurred to him. This wasn't the nineteenth century—there were were sat phones and radios, and if nothing else the ticket agent should know something.
But if he knew anything, he wasn't telling.
She was a practical woman, not one to wait around for repairs. If the train were stranded she'd probably found a flat to let while she waited, even though the train had comfortable accommodations, she'd want to take advantage of a last chance to explore an alpine village. She'd dig in and sample the culture, find a club with a good local band and drink microbrews. She'd tour the local historical monuments and maybe have a long conversation over chess in whatever language was spoken in that remote corner of the world.
She spoke all the languages, she'd have no trouble blending in. But when her train departed she'd be on her way to him again, forsaking whatever brief affair she found to occupy her time, to be her last hurrah.
Assuming she had gotten on the train at all. Assuming she would tear herself away from her new life by the stranded train.
Tap. Tap. Tap.
That was, of course, assuming that she was even able to board or re-board. Even in today's relatively safe world she may have met with intrigue, or accident. She could have been abducted and ferried off to one of the remote corners of the world where they trafficked in women like her...but no. Of course she would come. It was not her fault that the train had been inexplicably delayed. Was it possible that it had simply vanished? Certainly there had been two other coaches through from Berlin, how else could they have gotten through if the old master of the European railway had fallen on hard times and was blocking the track? Could it have slipped through some tear in the fabric of the universe, vanishing in the mountains like an ancient Roman legion?
As ridiculous as it sounded, it seemed the only thing that fit the facts.
He took out his antique gold watch and popped the cover, enjoying the ritual quality it added to checking the time, and the sensuality of the softly pulsing clockwork. Their time was slipping away. Tomorrow, the last ship would be leaving - the last that they would be allowed on board, the last that could be caught. If they missed it, there would be little left to do. The new life they planned together would be frustrated.
They had both, with great care, disposed of everything they would not need on their voyage. Jobs had been quit, possessions that were not too dear to part with were given away to family, to friends, to old lovers, and to charities. Loved ones had been bidden farewell. There was little now left to do but wait, and hope that she arrived in time.
Each day, as the hours rolled away around the clock face, he would take his lunch at a bistro on the main street and sit by the window, where he could watch the train tracks wending their way down the mountains from the pass into the vale. As his teeth cut through the bread and meat he would contemplate the voyage that lay before them, and as he sipped his wine he would roll it around on his tongue, remembering the taste of her sweat in the North African heat. He closed his eyes and remembered photographing her that first day they had met; she had lain naked atop a crumbling arch in the ruins of Carthage, painted orange and rose-pink by the retreating sun, making a cruel mockery of the exquisite idols strewn over the city long-since wasted. They had lasted longer than she would, and yet she burned brighter - the Platonic ideal the ancient sculptors had aspired to.
He had left her there among the ruins, dancing to music only she could hear - had he not known better he might have thought her mad, but somehow he understood her madness. He had read the secret in her eyes and her words, and he knew that she understood what he was about, as he understood her - too well, too soon, and perhaps too much, but the age of the place seemed to reach up from the salted earth like a specter to haunt their time together, and it fostered the understanding. After they met again the following day in Casablanca they did not part again until their ways diverged in Gibraltar. From there, she had gone home to London, and he to his home in Florence.
The sun was getting on now, and the cane tapped measuredly against the aging varnish on the oak. He knew underneath his justifications that she might not be on the train when it finally came in. It may not even have been wise to part as they had - the tying up of loose ends always seemed to spawn new threads in the tapestry, after all. What was it someone had once said?
"Let the dead bury their own dead."
Tap, tap, tap.
Tap.
The cane came to a rest, as if it had, of its own accord, measured out the final seconds that it was allotted. The man in the frock coat knew that his time for waiting had not yet expired, that there was another day yet that he could wait here, alone, at his post. He had taken this post of his own accord, a promise freely given. And yet the cane would not move.
And still the train would not come. As the shadows lengthened he heard the music of a lone guitarist from somewhere beyond the wheat field - a softly lilting tenor voice sang a plaintive lament that mirrored the man's own angst. Sounds of beauty and longing, words of delight turning too soon to nostalgia, as if the maple leaves were falling in June instead of October.
It wasn't her fault, he reminded himself, that the entire train seemed to have disappeared from the face of the Earth, nor that the underpaid railway staff seemed remarkably unconcerned. That alone told him that sooner or later it would arrive. He steeled himself to wait just a little bit longer.
His cane's foot began to move again, no longer marking time, but meter. It gave him 4/4 time and he hummed the song that he'd danced to with her so often in Casablanca, and as time went by he let the music grow in him until he floated in a dream, his music accompanied first by strings, then by brass. He repeated the lyrics like a mantra, as if it could summon the Express back from its mythic past and mysterious present and onto the platform where it belonged. Had he been standing rather than sitting on the bench he was sure that he'd have been dancing much like she'd danced in the sunset at Carthage.
The music built in his mind, built until it seemed to ring with a single, sustained note from a steam whistle, echoing off the mountains and rolling across the now-dark plains to his ears.
He opened his eyes with a start and looked up into the notch between the high peaks, where he saw snaking along the dark path a small, glowing millipede under a full head of steam. Van Gogh himself could not have painted a more perfect sight under the stars.
And as his heartbeat mounted upon itself like the coal in the steam engine's furnace, and he began to hear the rapid, rhythmic chugging, his eyes flitted away from the locomotive and up to the towering granite peaks beneath the infinite expanse retreating forever above them, and he was suddenly seized with an overwhelming regret. After tonight, there would be no more chance encounters in ruined cities, no more lovemaking in the grass, no more sunsets, no sound of the lark and the nightingale, just the artifice of radiation shielding and oxygen scrubbers. When her train finally arrived they would both be embarking to a realm where they knew nothing, and no language would serve them. A place where they would be equally aliens. It was the future, the chance to build a new world whose soils had not yet been fertilized with the blood of feuding brothers, but the grand destiny and the import of the task didn't soften the latecoming realization that tomorrow he would be leaving mankind's cradle for the last time. This too he had freely promised.
And yet, with all the aching beauty he would be leaving behind, he would be taking with him the paragon the Earth had produced, and there would be new generations to carry her beauty forward to the new worlds not yet familiar with the grace and barbarity that humanity would bring. She would be with him, and that thought tempered his grief.
The train was close now, less than a kilometer away, and he waited at the near end of the platform like a child trying to make the distance between himself and a long-expected guest as small as possible. As he watched it barreling towards him he made out the words "Orient Express" emblazoned under its smokestack and he breathed a sigh of relief at last.
It had arrived, his time of waiting was over.
All that remained to be seen was whether she was actually on board, or whether she had come at all. The living, after all, had to get on with the job of living while the dead buried their own.
As the enormous coal-fired dragon lumbered to a halt and its doors opened, the man wrapped his cloak close around his body and closed his eyes, afraid to find that his thread and hers no were longer entangled on Fate's skein. If he concentrated, he could almost see the tapestry. He could nearly pick out his thread, and hers...
With his cane tapping again upon the rough oak, marking the seconds as the train emptied, the new story began with a tap, tap, tap.
Sleep, Walk
“And did those feet, in ancient times walk upon England's mountains green! And was the holy lamb of God in England's pleasant pastures seen! Hosanna! Let us lift our heads in praise for the blessings of this life, and the hope of life eternal!”
Sure as I'm breathing, there is nothing on God's green Earth duller than the Church of England on Sunday morning. Well, nothing except that selfsame institution when it gets to send a newly-passed on its way to the sweet and mild hereafter.
Weddings, at least a bloke can take pleasure knowing that the poor nincompoops up front in their finery are doing their God's-honest best to make it a couple more hours without fidgeting. As good as watching horses at the starting gates, chomping and stamping until they're like to blow, and then letting them go just in time, so's they can fumble with all those straps and buttons in the back of the hack and get on with making up for their time in Anglican purgatory with a clumsy go-round of the least sacred act a vicar can admit to committing.
But funerals are worse. Miles worse. And after eight of them in the last year, I had the liturgy memorized so as I could recite it in my sleep. This time, the blooming vicar thought proper to improvise hisself a little bit of American-style glory hounding, which gave me a right ache in the melon and kept me from falling asleep like I'd come to do on my visits to the land of the hard seat.
Fifty years a man spends earning his bread and feeding his kin and finally getting a comfy chair and sofa to show for it, and then every Sunday morning and too many other afternoons, the woman what he done it for hauls him off and forces him to sit on hard wood when his old bones just want the glorious stuffed feathers of a proper seat cushion.
Now this scamp in a high collar was assaulting my ears with his blasted innovations. Were I his bishop, I'da had his collar and turned him out naked on the street. The sabbath ain't no day of rest when you can't sleep for the vicar's yammering.
Or the wife's, neither. Gladys didn't like me sleeping through church. “Sampson Barrowman,” she'd say every week, “if you fall asleep an' the Vicar catches you, sure'n you'll be headed straight for the fires of perdition when you breathe your last.” No use telling her to keep her nose in her own corner, either. Lord makes a woman, and the woman does what she wants when she's in her own home. All there is for a man to do, leastways a man who isn't inclined to show his woman the strap, is to carry on his own way.
“We gather here to honor our dearly departed...” blah blah blah we done heard it all before, Vic, stuff a muffin in it so as we might get on with lunch.
Cause sure as match girls get fossy jaw, I was gathering up a hunger rumble what like I never felt gathered before in my belly. Worse'n a Navvy a half hour before lunch, and I know cause I jockey'd a gang of 'em in me twenties, a'fore I got some sense in my head and learned the ways of keeping a good shop.
After a lifetime of sitting there and listening to the pious fellows jaw the air, suffering through cause Gladys thought it important to read the liturgy and renew acquaintances with the other women in town, I was about one stomach grumble away from the end of my tether. I'd done heard enough about death and dying and the sweet hereafter to make any bloke over thirty feel the twiggy fingers of old man Death gripping around his dicky heart.
Leastways, it felt like that to me.
And I'll be a blamed fool if I was gonna take it anymore.
So I stood up and looked the young cuss claiming to be the Vic straight in the eye, and gave him a good hearty scowl. Must've not been used to backtalk; his ruddy great moonface went white with rage, but a'fore he could start with his sputtering I clambered over all the obstacles 'tween me and the aisle. Some of them had names, some of them were wood and being sat on, all of them were in the bloody way.
Leave it to the working class of bloody Manchester to mistake a funeral for a party, and get all huffy when someone got fed up with their humbug besides. Gladys was the only one with the gumption to say anything, but then we'd left the working class back a long time past.
“Sampson Barrowman, don't you dare embarrass me like this!”
I grumbled as I walked out. Too late for that, Gladys. I already done the embarrassing part, I thought. It wasn't really worth the effort to say it out loud.
Noonday on the front porch of Manchester Cathedral was as gloomy as I knew to expect, but just for once couldn't Jesus shine a little light down through the coke smoke?
Then again, I was too blooming hungry to give a fig, and there was an odor—such an aroma!—on the breeze. It drew me down the avenue like a fish with a hook through his cheek.
I must confess, never was I so rude in all my days walking upright. A proper merchant and aspiring gentleman isn't meant to shove his way past the young women, or pass the widows without giving alms, or fail to notify the constable of the men away from the work houses. But the fog was heavy and the air was black, and some days the world could settle itself right down in the belly of Hades and you wouldn't shed a tear. I'd bloody well had enough, I had.
A dirty, grimy, rotten place is Manchester. The sewers don't work when it rains, and no one pays it much never mind if you dump your pots in the street. Not like London, what with their clean modern sewers. Why the missus wouldn't never countenance a move when we coulda sold the store and made out? That's 'tween her and the Almighty. I just do what I can to get by.
Bloody ugly smells, but that aroma, it drew me to a little square. There, in a corner—who'd ever'a believed it, but I swear on my father, god rest him—I spied me a little shop selling steak-and-kidney pies and pasties and meat on sticks, enough to make your chops water from halfway across England. Weren't nothing else in the world but that smell, the glorious smell of burning, bleeding, lovely flesh calling to my empty, aching, screaming belly.
There were a handful of tables out front. In my Sunday best, I was overdressed for the Thursday afternoon crowd, but I found me a good place to sit at an empty table. Nobody wanted to share a table with me looking like I'd been dressed up for dinner with the Queen herself.
And every minute I sat there, waiting for the damn waitress, my mouth got wetter. My nose got ruddier. My eyes got blurrier. My stomach moaned louder.
God in heaven, I jes had to eat. Now.
But there weren't no waitress. No one coming out nohow. And I had to have something.
Everyone around was getting served but me, and by some rat of a boy who weren't no more polite than my brother's mongrel.
“Boy!” I beat on the table “Boy!”
The runt looked at me like I was with the orphanage, turned around and ran back into the restaurant. Bloody disgraceful service. In my salad days a man with a decent suit and coin in his pocket was one whose custom a merchant wanted.
If I'd done my bit against the old C of E today, then hang it all, I was gonna strike another blow for good manners from the bloody help. The service profession could use a firm strapping or two, besides. I stood up, stalked through the tables as best I could, shoved an old lady out of the way and banged on the counter. “Service!” I cried.
Up from behind the counter come a scrawney young thing—she couldn't have been more than sixteen—and cowed in front of me.
“Right, now, guv, jes tell us whatcha like and we'll be sprightly on it.”
I looked over the rack behind her. “Meat. Pies. There.” I pointed at the gorgeous, weeping pies just behind her, with the gravy seeping through the crust so slow and lazy it could make your tongue melt just looking.
“Sure'n now, guv. One second.”
“Now!” I was gonna die. I never knew such a powerful need a'fore.
She took a pie and wrapped it in a cloth, placed it on the counter before me like a proper shop girl doing her proper job all proper. “Tuppence each,” she said.
I didn't pay her, yet. Had to make sure they was as good as their whiff. I dove in, but two bites and it was just sand-tasting goop. They'd like as not been making the dough with shop shavings and the gravy with boiled shoes. I threw the pie in her face and howled. I had to eat. I couldn't see straight for how powerful hungry I got.
There was nothing for it. I reached across the counter and grabbed the shop girl. I pulled her over the counter and slammed her head down on the wood and yelled at her for being so blinking stupid.
Then that smell. Oh god that smell. Fresh and lovely and bursting with goodness like God had sent me my luncheon from his own kitchen.
It was red. Flowing out her head all over the counter. Lordy it did smell so fine. Coming right out that split in her scalp, that smell like I never smelled before.
I leaned forward and tasted. Once I started, I couldn't stop. Every mouthful heaven, more heaven than anything else, ever.
Then my Gladys had to go and ruin everything. “Sampson Barrowman, you right scamp!” When I was a lad and first heard that voice, I never thought I'd be tired of it.
Now I didn't want nothing else but for her to leave me to my damned lunch.
“Sampson Barroman, are you listening to me? Get your mouth out of that poor girl's brain and march back to your funeral, or you won't get no last rites nohow!”
Naturally. Finally got my lunch and she wants to drag me back to church. Bloody vicars and their sermons.
Angels Unawares
This is how it happened. I swear. What you are about to hear is the absolute, unvarnished truth – I don'a give bugger all about whatch'a found in the histories. It wasn'a a suicide, and it wasn'a murder. I was there, and I saw, and no one else did. Their “forensics” don'a mean a bloody thing, because I know. And what I saw is more amazing than what they think happened. But I kept it to myself, just to be sure that no one would ruin it – because I promised her, you see. And I had to keep the promise – no one could have broken it after seeing the look in her eyes.
But first, I suppose you'll want to know about how it started – what it was like in this town back then. The commotion started back when her body was found beaten against the rocks like so much driftwood. That wasn'a the unusual part – a lot of people fell from that trail on the bluff. That's why the laird put the fences up when I was a lad. It never stopped anyone from going down there, you understand, just made him feel better when there was a fuss. Great spot for the spring frolic, it was, and of course we were all up there as normal. When they find bodies down in the surf there it's usually a suicide or an accident – someone gone off their melon on too much whisky. But they're always normal people. She was unusual, and the lengths they went to trying to explain it made the whole town start locking their doors at night.
They said that she was mutilated – or deformed - that her body wasn'a like a woman's body, but they weren'a sure if the fall did it or if it was something else. They said that the policemen fought with each other to avoid having to be near her. It was hideous and beaten, and they'd never seen anything so brutally done. In the end it was only her cloak that identified her.
It was always her cloak that announced her.
Dark, it was, and seemed to fall about her like water. She always wore it up there at the frolics. Even when one of the youths would bring a guitar or a penny whistle and she danced for us with those dances that would pull us away from the material world for a moment or three – even then the cloak was her companion. She liked it because it kept her safe in the shadows, blended right in when it was dark, no matter where she was. Glorious, shimmering dull blue, deep but faded, fastened round her neck with a dull golden braid - thinking of it now I realize that she and the cloak seemed to be two expressions of a third, hidden thing. Like she was a tired faerie from an older, forgotten world. But that's maybe the mists of fond memory speaking.
So they became convinced, eventually, that she had killed herself, though they couldn'a imagine why, and eventually the memory of her faded into the ghost story the young ones all hear from the older ones upon their first visit to the frolics. Everyone was sure that it was suicide, or that she'd been killed by a lover – an older, married man they fancied she'd been seeing. And partly the reason was that no one they questioned had seen her that night after the moon rose.
But I saw her. And I know what happened.
We always called her Aadi. One of the other young men who came to the frolics heard it from his father serving in India – he said it meant “beginning.” She was the first one to clear the grove on the bluff, and as far as anyone could remember she had begun the spring frolics. I suppose the old druids would have called her the May Queen or thought she was a dryad, but we had no use for superstition. The dawning future had enough magic of its own. The twentieth century was coming, nature was being conquered, and, in our little lowland village far away from the noise and dirt of the factories at least, there was nowhere to look but forward and up. Of course, all of us knew her real name – though none of us knew her age - but Aadi suited her better than the name she called herself, and that is always how I'll remember her. The sound of it was always soothing, and she seemed to me as ageless as the hills she lived in. My father told me, before he passed on, that someone had always been up there – when he was a lad he too had gone to the bluff and met the woman in the trees who lived up in the hills, but that one had been a minstrel. Aadi was no minstrel – when pressed she might have been able to squawk.
It was early may – late enough that the rain had stopped the pretense of snow and had contented itself merely with being wet. Ten or fifteen of us went up to the grove on the bluff as often as we could to catch the scent of the changing seasons, to dance and play, to wrestle with the lassies among the tall grasses, and to watch the moon set on the sea. Someone had brought a book of poetry that night, and we handed it around with the Glenlivet, reading to each other while the wind came up. On that cold night the drink was like hot butter, coating inside with warmth, smooth as a woman's neck. When mixed with the pine fire and the smell of drizzle, the glow of faces in the firelight, the sound of Shelly being read in the halting voice of a seventeen year old Scots lad, it seemed to thin the veil between the worlds. It was a night that felt more real than any other, perhaps because it was as unreal as any I have yet lived. An evening when, for a moment, time stepped outside of itself and flirted with eternity.
When I'd first happened upon the grove, as a twelve-year-old explorer, it seemed the perfect place for a hideaway. The tall grasses and thistles that grew around it made it all the more private for being a nearly impenetrable grove of pines. It was already clear in the middle, and there were endless tunnels and paths wending their way through the trees and under the bushes. One of them led to the bluff above the ocean, with a view so long that you could almost see the continent peaking over the horizon. I started bringing my friends up there – at first it was just other lads from the mill - after all, what group of boys doesn'a need a place to retreat to, to learn to smoke and drink Dad's pilfered scotch, to brag about imaginary conquests, to dream about finally growing up, and to share the old spook tales that we'd all heard in the nursery. We made plans about hiking the highlands, joining the RN, getting away to the cities where life was wild and free. It was the place we stole away to when we ducked church to read the subversive books that the Priest never preached from. Eventually we started bringing girls along, using the beauty and secrecy of the place to find out exactly why their breasts were like two fauns running in a field, to learn about the peculiar lilt of a lass's voice that could make you fall asleep contented, and to learn exactly how many scratches thistles can give you while you're concentrating on other things. No one really knew when Aadi started showing up – looking back it feels like she had always been there, hiding just outside the firelight. When she finally showed herself, no one thought to ask where she came from. I don'a think anyone really cared – she knew the stories that kept us all coming back. Not just the old stories about sleepwalkers and faeries, but the real stories behind it. The stories of armies getting lost in the fog, of great battles won and lost to keep Scotland free, of times long forgotten in arid lands far away. She told us how the sleepwalkers were invented to explain why the wildcats only came out at night, about how the old bones of the world frighten the ancient Pict. She taught us about life, brought us news of the outside world. She didn'a look much older than we did, but she understood the whys. She taught us to love the world we were in, even though we all wanted to grow up and move out into the world. Under her, we learned patience, to savor life as it went by, to not be pushed under by cares. We learned to love life because it was real, and to love stories because they were not. She taught us gratitude, even for sorrow. She taught us what it meant to be alive.
And that night, Aadi sat behind the circle, watching with her eyes glowing in the firelight, looking for all the world like a raven eying an egg. Her eyes were bright with mystery, smiling at the clumsy joy and comradeship around the fire. She took the drink when it was passed to her, and then the book. But when she opened it to read she stood and stepped into the circle. And she read. She could not sing a single note, but she read – in a voice that was full of sorrow, like a willow branch weighed down with snow to the breaking point. Her voice was music, but that night it did not draw us to sing. Although I don'a remember the words she spoke I do remember the sound. It was the sound of deepest regret, the loss of a mother whose children were grown. It was the last frolic – we had all finally reached maturity. We were moving on, having a last evening together before the first of the lads shipped out with the RN. In the cold of the night, in the glow of the fire, her voice was the strength of weakness and loss.
When she was done, we sat around for a long time, looking at each other, knowing truly for the first time that something magical was ending. She passed the book, and the readings continued, but what had been a frolic had become a meditation. I was actually surprised when couples started fading into the shadows as was customary. I wasn'a ready for the night to end, and although the closeness of the lass on my arm was comforting, I wanted to be alone. Before the book came around to me again, I stood and faded into the shadows myself. I quietly stepped back from the fire and took the path leading down to the edge of the bluff. The pale sliver of the waning moon overhead threw just enough light to pick out the path amid the low brambles.
A chill wind blew up from the sea below, carrying the usually distant sound of the waves straight up to me. I couldn'a see many stars through the scattered clouds, but the moon glimmered faintly on the waters below. It felt as if the world were changing around me, as if I wasn'a walking completely in the realm of flesh and blood. And despite the wind, the air felt still and portentous – I couldn'a hear any owls or other sounds of the night. It felt like there should have been mist in the air, but there wasn'a. Rather it was clear all the way to the dark horizon. I pulled my lamb-lined oilskin tighter around me to keep out the cold, but I didn'a want to return to the warmth of the fire and my friends.
I don'a know how long I stood there on the cliff, looking out at the seam, but when I turned away I caught a glimpse of her a few yards down the bluff. She stood, little more than a black shadow against the pale dark sky, gazing out at the water as I had been doing, and I was surprised to discover that I wanted to know more about her. Oh, she had told us about herself, about her parents, about being raised in the hills outside of the town and traveling to visit family in London for holidays, and I certainly knew her well enough. We had shared many moments around the fire and in the heather, enjoying the camaraderie of the group and more private moments of discovery. I had talked long with her over the years – she was, after all, my friend. But I was suddenly seized with the notion that I didn'a know her at all. As if our time together – all that time – had been merely a dream, and I was truly seeing her tonight for the first time.
As I walked over to her, across the brambles and grasses, she turned to me, cloak clasped shut with one hand, and cocked her head to one side, pulling the wind-blown hair out of her eyes. Her bare feet and legs held her up against the wind, and she seemed small. For the first time since I knew her, she seemed small.
“Aadi?” I called out to let her know it was me.
“Yes?” She looked at me as if I had interrupted something very private, and I stopped for a second while she studied me. Standing there, against the gray of the sea and the blue-black horizon, she seemed pensive and vulnerable, more so than I had ever known her to be. And yet it seemed improper to approach, so I began to turn away.
“Nothing.”
I walked a couple of steps and she called out to me, “Wait! Please?” I turned back and walked towards her.
“Are you sure I'm not intruding?” I arrived at her side, and she dropped her hand and turned back towards the ocean.
“No. I thought I wanted to be alone, but I'd rather have you here. I just wanted to look at it one more time before I go.”
“You're leaving too? You hadn'a said...” I stumbled, and stopped. Even though I was going away to the army in a few weeks I had trouble imagining that place without her presence. “Where are you moving to?”