Even during these silences I knew that not a crumb of gold or the meanest glass bead was without a story behind it. Sometimes she would smile, and hold out to me a pearl, or a garnet, or a carved shell, and say, "Your father won me this for placing first in the joust at Fairmond," or "This was a present from my sister the day your brother was born," or "This was my mother's from her wedding trousseau." Sometimes she would not say, merely gazing down at whatever she held, and smile with a kind of sadness. I watched as she picked up each item in turn, looked at it carefully, and set it aside. There was the rosary she wore to church, with long beaded chain and silver rood, there was a handful of gold rings, and a number of bracelets and brooches, a tangle of necklaces, and pearl earrings. I have seen more wealth since, at times all on one person, at times in my own hands, but to my boy's eyes it was like a king's treasure box, sumptuous and rare. I protested that I was not, if only because it was good to see her smiling, and bent over the treasure in her lap. "I'm looking at the jewelry your father has given me, would you like to see? Or are you too old to sit with your mother, Grissom?" There were stamped brass boxes and delicate porcelain jars scattered on the bed next to her, and I called twice before she looked up. It was as if my father was already dead.Ī week after he left I found her in her chambers one afternoon, a small glittering pile of jewels in her lap. Her soft skin became like cold wax, and her glossy dark hair threaded with grey. My mother, who I remember as being very beautiful, seemed to age ten years overnight. I might not have been sure of its actual purpose, but even my ignorance could not keep me from noticing the pall that had fallen on our home. I was, therefore, greatly dismayed that my father should be ordered from his home and told to report before the committee of inquisition. ![]() I had heard very little of the conflict in the city. I might not have either, but that my mother's hand was on my shoulder, and I did not wish to leave her alone there. ![]() When father rode out of the gates that last day, Duane did not stay to watch him go. Duane had not even placed, and the echoes of the fight he and father had as a result seemed to linger in the stones of the keep for days afterward. Duane was not ungifted with a sword, but there was little doubt that I was better, even before I finished first in the boy's events at Apstead Tourney the summer before. He and father had never gotten along they were perhaps too much alike, and father's expectations were great for his first born. I had just finished training for the morning, and Duane was in a foul mood to have been soundly thrashed by a boy three years his younger who hadn't even gotten his height yet.ĭuane was usually in a foul mood. ![]() It was a cool fall day, rare even for the highlands where I was born, and the world was like the swan-wing on my mother's favorite brooch, bright and endless. The day the Cardinal's men came for my father, I was down in the rear courtyard with my brother, looking for empty seed-pods to make into boats.
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