Day 3 1627 words

I am dreaming, or drifting, or remembering. A boy running through the open fields and into the cool copse of trees. He has my features, my eyes, but he does not see what I can see. Was I ever that child?  Running to keep up with the hunters on their strong horses, to follow the pack. Of course they are already hundreds of yards away from me; a string of dark shapes on the skyline of the field. A skylark sings as the boy turns into the shade – one sharp, beautiful note of warning. I have never listened to warnings. I do not do so now.
Fox scent, deep and clover, red and musty. The hounds are beyond this place in the sunlight – are they leading or following the impatient riders? But the prey is in this wood, this circle of darkness in the last autumn warmth. I follow. This boy, the one I am dreaming, the boy I am not, he follows the fox scent to the lair.
She is standing, panting, at the edge of her earth. There is noise from the den behind her – cubs. She knows what is coming for her. She looks at me as I stand silently, and she bares her teeth and growls like a hound. Boy and fox have choices. To run, to seek shelter. A romantic idea of saving her, of having a pet foxcub, runs through the boy’s head. Not through mine. Surely I never thought something so weak. She lifts her head to me, this brave mother, and I take one step forward, and as my foot crushes the dead leaves under my school shoes I hear the hounds, loud and close, the voices of the huntsmen and the wailing cry of the Master’s horn. They are upon her before I can move backward, or forward, but I can fly into the sky, this time, because this is a dream, and I can avoid the look in the fox’s eyes that told me I had betrayed her, and I can circle with the skylarks and not smell the blood, the entrails, and not hear the wails of the cubs as the hunters pull them from the den and beat them to death against a rock. Yes, I am dreaming. I can quell the excitement that I felt as the Master daubed warm blood on my forehead. The boy in my dream laughed.  But even as I dream I am aware that I am crying.

Ernest had been forced to let Rosalina remain where she fell, and to make her as comfortable as he could by pillowing her on her clothes and covering her with her cape. As he did so he felt the portrait was mocking his efforts. He became aware, under its influence, of himself as nothing more than a weak and undersized child, scrabbling on the floor next to his helpless Mother.  He took a decision not to look at it until his Mother was settled, and as her breathing became easier, and some colour returned to her face, only then did he leave her side to study what she had created.  Ernest looked carefully at the features of the man now commanding the bare wall above the fire. He fetched the scratched looking glass from under the divan, and took a careful look at his face, before turning back to the portrait. He had to admit, there were similarities that marked him as his Father’s son. The same wide set of the eyebrows, the shape of his chin, the proportions of his cheekbones. Ernest wondered for the first time if he would grow up to be a handsome man. He looked at his face again, hunting for the cruelty, the scorn that he saw in the portrait, or even for some sign that it might appear. This time he was glad that he was still a boy, with nothing more than tiredness and hunger, and some dirt, visible.  He wondered what to do with the portrait. It was the only thing Rosalina, the talented portrait artist, had finished in years. It was, he sensed, important in its own right. But he did not like to leave his Mother, or himself, defenceless beneath it.
He tiptoed from the room, locking the door behind him, and went to beg some sheets of paper from the Mistress baker. He had to hand over a penny, and endure a lot of questioning as to what his Mother might be ‘up to’, but he came back with four large sheets. One he pinned carefully over the portrait, and rubbed at it with his whole sleeve, in careful downward strokes. The soft charcoal transferred easily to the paper, and he was left with a print, a mirror image of his Father. This he rolled up and secreted under a floorboard in a space that until now he had reserved for such boyish treasures as an owl’s feather, a glass bead and a pebble with a hole right through it.  The other sheets of paper he pinned over the portrait, blanking it over, and over the worst sketches of the dark vegetation, the bushes full of eyes, that scrambled over the walls.

He then turned back to his Mother and felt her forehead for any signs of fever.  Since she was sleeping, and now snoring, peacefully, he felt that he could leave her alone, and go back to work before Mr Triskit gave his job to some other lad. He tiptoed out, and left his mother in the room, with the door locked and the key hung around his neck.  It seemed to Ernest that in the short time between the lamp lit night and full day, all of London was awake and on the streets. Many of the street sellers slept under their barrows, and had only to get up and dust themselves down in order to begin trading again. But for others, they began with buying their ingredients wholesale, fires being lit, loads carried, stalls set out and shops swept. And through the middle of this the early morning businessmen, in the new style short jacketed suits and grey overcoats, picking their way through the trade like so many beetles stalking across an indifferent ants nest. Ernest found he could not stop looking at each of them, comparing them to the portrait. He told himself off for assuming that his Father must be a respectable man, a merchant or even a gentleman, when in all likelihood he was just another slum or street dweller, and what the Rookery women called his Mother’s ‘airs and graces’ were all playacting.  A man with a face that malevolent must have wronged his Mother more violently than simply breaking her heart. For if her heart had been broken, she must have loved such a monster. Ernest tried to decide if it was better to be the product of that sort of love, or of a moment’s casual seduction in an alley, but the question was too big for him; he did not know what a ‘seduction’ actually involved, and he knew even less of the passions that animated Rosalina now, or ten years ago when he was conceived.

In their midday break from the relentless trading at Spitalfields, Mr Triskit took fright at Ernest’s questions about the nature of a Father, believing for a moment that Rosalina had named him as responsible. But when he realised what Ernest needed to know, the fright was replaced by bashfulness. Mr Triskit had eight daughters, (each one named after a flower) but had never been asked to explain how they came to be in the world.  Fortunately, he also bred fancy rabbits for the pet and fur trade, and so Ernest’s questions could be answered under the respectable guise of a lesson in animal husbandry. However, the question of consent or the nature of dishonour and seduction is not raised among rabbits or their breeders, and so although Ernest, now red around the ears from embarrassment, was put right about the mechanics of reproduction, his other questions would have to wait, as Mr Triskit said, until he was growed up.  Ernest was brave enough to mutter something about that being a long time on the little food he had, and Mr Triskit gave him a pork pie to avoid any further questions, so the day took a turn for the better. Ernest worked hard at his tallying all afternoon, in order to avoid thinking about what he might face when he returned home to the locked room.

But his mother was awake, washed and fully dressed when he unlocked the door, apologising for having confined her, and handing over the unheard of luxury of a whole rabbit, another gift from the unnerved Mr Triskit.  He emptied out the slop bucket into the drain, and skinned and washed the rabbit  beside it. Rosalina was quiet, watching him cook. The paper was still in place over the portrait and the landscapes. But finally Ernest had to ask her ‘Am I very like him?’ Rosalina’s eyes flickered to the covered portrait and back to her son.
‘You may be, I think you will be equally as handsome.’ She forced a smile.
‘Do you think him handsome? With such an expression?’
‘That is not  - you need not think about such things. He is gone from your life, and the light has gone from mine.’
Ernest felt something shift inside him, from simple childish adoration of his Mama to the irritation of a man with a woman who is using drama to avoid giving a straight answer.
‘And what is his name? What kind of man is he? And why is he not here to take care of us?’