“That’s so sad.”
“Yeah. The worst part is—” he pointed to the word Mary, “—no one ever called my mother by her real name. She was known as Elizabeth. That name should have marked her final resting place, but the priest didn’t know.”
“Why didn’t you change it?”
“Uncle Arthur wanted to. He and my mother were...close, but my father forbade him. Even when Father passed, Arthur would not go against the right of a husband.”
“How noble of him.”
“Well—” David took my hand and led me away, “—he’s been around a while. He’s old-fashioned.” When we stopped in front of the next two headstones, David smiled, rocking back on his heels. “These two are the best.”
“Jason Gabriel Knight. Nineteen-sixteen,” I read, but it was the second one that grabbed my attention straight away; my heart jumped into my chest when I saw his name written there, even though I was standing right beside him;
David Thomas Knight—beloved son and hero.
1894-1918.
“Why did you die?”
“There was an explosion. A bomb.” His tight smile caged laughter. “There was no way anyone could’ve survived it. Pertinent to our laws, I had no choice but to move on and become somebody else.”
“Were you the only one killed?”
“Thankfully, yes. But, I had established quite a good life for myself; had plenty of money in the bank, a house, friends—but no will. So, with my brother and only kin supposedly dead, my estate became ward of the government, and I had to start all over again.” He laughed; I covered my mouth. “Talk about learning from your mistakes.”
“Well, what good would mistakes be if you didn’t get to learn from them?” I shrugged, then looked down at the next headstone in the plot. The name didn’t match the others though; hers was Deveraux.
“She was my mother—” David answered my thought, “—my aunt by blood, but mother by choice.” He stepped away and drew the dried brown vine hugging the stone top away, revealing a name and an inscription on the bronze plate:
Arietta Mary Deveraux
Beloved Mother and Aunt.
Lies beneath, sent to the earth with child in arms.
Safe for eternity in the embrace of the Lord. 1908.
My skin tightened with little bumps. “Child?”
“Yes,” David whispered. “She died the second the child was born.” He focused on his toe as he scuffed up a chunk of grass. “We buried them together.”
“Nineteen-oh-eight? So you were only...” I counted in my head for a second.
“I turned fourteen a few months after she died,” David said.
I watched the grief trickle across his brow before he contained it. “After all these years, you still feel it? You still feel her loss so strongly?”
He bit his lip. “There are some things you can never move on from, Ara.”
“So, she died in childbirth—like your mother?”
“No.” The way he said that, his voice laden with detest, made my blood run cold.
“Will you tell me what happened?” I asked cautiously.
David looked up at me quickly, then, leaving my words alone behind him, walked over and sunk down on the grass with his back against her stone—as if he’d sat there a thousand times before. “You look like her,” he said.
“I do?”
He nodded. “Her hair was long, like yours, but as gold as the sun. And her eyes—” he closed his, dropping his head as a slight smile lifted his lips, “—as blue as the ocean. She would have loved you.” He patted the spot next to him; I sat down, my back against the stone, too, my legs crossed. “She would have been proud of me to have found such a sweet girl.”
“I’m sure she knows—somehow.” I wanted to take his hand, but there was an air of tension around him—threatening, like he’d explode if I touched him.
“So you believe in the afterlife—believe they’re watching over us?”
I shrugged. “I guess I have to. Otherwise it all just feels too final.”
“It is final,” he said coldly, obviously not realising how deep that hurt. His gaze frosted the distant horizon, his hands tight in his lap. “Ever since the day she came to retrieve us from the orphanage after my father passed away, she treated Jason and I as if we were her own sons.”
“Why were you in an orphanage?” I cut in.
“It was temporary—while they waited for her to arrive from England.” He seemed to watch a memory on the grass between his feet. “But we were treated kindly there.”
“So, no Oliver Twist scenario?”
David laughed once. “No. Nothing like that.”
“What about your uncle? Why didn’t he take you?”
“Set rules,” he stated.
“Oh.” Of course, silly me.
“Well, in Arthur’s defence, when Arietta passed, he managed to have many rules bent in order to have Jason and I in his charge. It’s never been done before, or again.”
“Whose butt did he kiss?” I joked.
“The king’s.”
“Oh,” I said, and something in the brevity of his words made my curiosity on that subject flee. “So, how did Arietta die?”
He picked up an orange, star-shaped leaf, scratching the veins with his thumbnail. “I knew you couldn’t resist asking me that again.”
“Sorry. You don’t have to tell me.” I folded my hands into my lap and looked up at the tree above us; the leaves rustled lightly in the breeze, and despite this being a place the dead rested, I felt comfortable here, like it was just some pleasant picnic spot—somewhere to sit and think about the past.
“She always wanted children,” he said out of the blue; I sat still, holding my breath in case he should change his mind. “She loved my brother and I, but wanted a daughter. She used to play hopscotch with the little girls on the sidewalk outside our house.”
“I love hopscotch.”
David smiled at me. “The summer after my father’s passing, Arietta was walking to the market when a sailor stopped her on the roadside. He asked if she was okay, and she asked why he would inquire such an odd question to a stranger who showed no signs of distress. When he said he was concerned for her pain—since it must have hurt when she fell from Heaven, she fell completely and unconditionally in love with him.”