Brother Mine (Part 2)

                   Welcome!

November has done it again. We usually think of Adelaide’s hot weather being in January and February but I reckon you can count on one week of November giving us a foretaste of it. This is the week: 35+ degrees Celsius forecast for at least four days of this week. As long as the garden doesn’t suffer from it, I’m okay with that. I think the feijoa likes it. This is its first flush of flowers since we planted it a year ago. My tastebuds are already preparing themselves, but the flowers are my favourite feature of this small tropical South American tree.

Now for the conclusion of the story we began last week, a historical fiction of an undervalued son and a strange visitor.

Brother Mine (Part 2)

'Richard, my dear fellow! You're ready by the look of it. Let us depart immediately before—' and he peered towards the dining room with one eye and up the stairs with the other, a peculiarity no doubt made possible by his wall eye. Grabbing my sleeve as I stood firmly clenching my teeth to prevent my jaw dropping like an imbecile, Bryant linked arms with me and almost dragged me to the carriage awaiting us. The livery was unfamiliar; everything was as incomprehensible as my apparent imaginings the previous evening.

            For the first mile or so, Bryant said nothing but looked out of the window to one side and then the other, casting me an occasional smile or a wink as his gaze shifted.

             I sat looking sideways at him, trying to recall if I had ever heard of him. I had spent some time in London the previous year, but none of my acquaintances had intimated the existence of such a person. Surely I would have heard some rumour about a fellow of his odd appearance and outfit. City gossips have nothing better to talk about.

            After a time, when I was beginning to wonder if I had been rash in following this character without an explanation, he sighed loudly and took off his wig, scratched his near-bald scalp, and tossed the wig aside, where it slid off the leather seat and onto the floor.

            'I take it you received word last evening of our plans for your future? And that you are not unwilling?' He looked me in the eye most impertinently, or so my father would have judged, and then turned away as if he had seen the answer. I answered nevertheless, since I had no idea what he thought he had seen.

            'I – I was – uh, visited l-l-last night, it is t-t-true. Excuse my ret-my ret-reticence, but I had b-been wondering if I had s-simply drunk too much brandy. Even n-n-now, I confess, I am s-s-struggling to comprehend.'

            He nodded briefly as if that was a matter of course, and I relaxed a little. Whatever was happening to me, it appeared that my understanding was not essential, merely my acquiescence. What did I have to lose? I asked myself. The unlikely proposal of the previous night had seemed to offer more hope than I had experienced since my brother's demise on the Continent seven years earlier.

            'We will be at the port in a little over two hours, so I will begin your instruction immediately. You will cease to be known as Richard from this moment; you are Jack.' And you will address me as, in fact, I am – your mother's second cousin, Frederick Schwingenschloegl.' At this point he took off his outer garments, bundled them tightly and threw them, together with the wig, into the river we were at that moment crossing on a narrow bridge. He pulled out a box from under the seat and proceeded to dress all in black, a respectable German traveller.

            I had not imagined it. This improbable man was offering me the impossible and now I grasped it with fervour. If I could not have my brother, I would be my brother. One day, in the future planned for me by my mother's German relatives, I would return to England to claim the inheritance of the father who would not recognise his younger son. I only hoped my mother would live long enough to enjoy her victory.

Until next week…

Claire Belberg

Brother Mine (Part 1)

                         Welcome!

blue passionflower

The blue passionvine is in bloom – a fantastical flower, if ever there was one. It’s unfortunate that a flower with such promise doesn’t fulfil it with fruit. This was the rootstock of a Nellie Kelly grafted passionfruit. The graft didn’t survive, and now we have rampant blue passionvine trying to overtake the garden, latching onto the orange tree and consuming the water meant for it. But I’ve always enjoyed the peculiarities of weeds, so for the time being the wild vine remains, and I’m enjoying the crazy flowers.

The story of this week began as an exercise with my writing group, where we had to start with the first paragraph of George MacDonald’s Phantastes. In recognition that 1200 words is a lot to read in one burst on the internet, I have divided it into two parts. The second will be posted next week (poetry readers will have to wait an extra week before their next ‘fix’.)

Brother Mine

I awoke one morning with the usual perplexity of mind which accompanies the return of consciousness. As I lay and looked through the eastern window of my room, a faint streak of peach-colour, dividing a cloud that just rose above the low swell of the horizon, announced the approach of the sun. As my thoughts, which a deep and apparently dreamless sleep had dissolved, began again to assume crystalline forms, the strange events of the foregoing night presented themselves anew to my wondering consciousness.

            I hardly had time to decide whether I believed in them before the rest of the household awoke with all the clamour and bustle that entailed. Sighing, I rolled out of my bed, gave myself a quick wash, and dressed. Just in case the events I imagined of yesterday had, in fact, been real, I took up my cloak and retrieved a small pistol from the back of a bureau drawer. I tucked the latter into a flap inside my jacket which could have been made for the purpose. One never knew quite what had been intended by my deceased elder brother, Jack.

            I headed downstairs as a bell sounded. I knew therefore that my father was already in the dining room, and I checked my appearance in a long and ornately ugly mirror in the hall before proceeding to his inspection. My short black hair was neat, the russet and dark brown clothes well-made and becoming, according to my mother; there was only the uneven features of my shadowed face to displease, and those I had long ago resigned myself to. At least I could remember my brother when I saw my reflection, for we had been as seeds from the same pod. I tried to arrange my face in an affable pose, and approached the dining table.

            'Look like you're only fit for a walk in the woods,' Father grunted. 'Don't you have business today?' He gave me a piercing look under his lowered eyebrows, and I shrank from it as usual.

            'N-n-no, that is tom-m-morrow,' I said, taking a seat at the far end of the table. I prayed my sister would come earlier than was her wont, for she had the knack of distracting Father from his black moods. No matter what I said, my very presence seemed to increase that frame of mind.

            The maid dished up sausages, eggs and the remains of last night's pie while the silence of the room deepened and my father's eyebrows fell so low they almost interfered with his mandibular motion. My sister did not show, and my mother was, I assumed, nursing her constant ill-health in her own suite.

            It was as I bit into the pie that I realised, with a lurch of my stomach, that nothing had changed. Last night's events could not have occurred; they had merely been the expression of my growing desperation to know my father's approval. That moment of despair rendered the taste of pigeon pie thereafter unpalatable.

            I escaped the strained silence of the dining room with only a handful of shattering observations from my disillusioned pater. I stood in the hall for a moment, trying to decide on a course of action that would keep me out of trouble for the day. At that moment the butler announced an arrival.

            Assuming it was one of my father's business associates, I turned to go through the drawing room and thence out of the house to the stables, but Poulton ahem-ed behind me.

            'For you, Master Richard. A—' and here he looked again at the calling card in his gloved hand, 'Lord Frederick Bryant. He says you are expecting him.'

            The fellow who had announced himself so boldly looked quite irregular. I supposed that being a lord and used to having his way, he had chosen his outfit for his own peculiar tastes rather than fashion. I was not enamoured of fashion myself, but I would have found it unthinkable to wear old-fashioned purple hose with black knee-high buckled boots and a red and orange embroidered waistcoat under an open surcoat of shiny black fabric. This too had buckles, polished to gleam even as they tinkled at the jerk of his stride.

Look for Part 2 next week.
Until then…
Claire Belberg