bydegrees (bydegrees) wrote in lightning_war, @ 2008-12-17 23:02:00 |
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Current mood: | frustrated |
Thursday morning, 17 September 1942, at the Bradburies' home in southern England
Isaac Bradbury leaned against the doorframe of the kitchen. Elizabeth Loveday sat at the kitchen table clutching her baby son Matthew to her, sniffling loudly, and Isaac's wife Alice was standing behind her with her arms folded. He sighed, and tried again to explain why he was urgently proposing that Lizzie engage her daughter Kathleen to Florian Leffoy, because there was nothing else to be done.
"I do not like this any more than you do," he said. "I really really do not."
"And yet," Alice said, in a pointed tone of voice, apprearing to address a point on the wall somewhat to his left. "You seem to have agreed to it anyway."
"I don't see what alternative we have, Elizabeth," Isaac said. He wished that he could talk to Alice, who was probably calm enough to listen to him if not to show it, but everything he wanted to say to her couldn't be said to Lizzie. "The contract would be written in such a way that neither Kat nor Florian would be bound by it as adults if they chose not. And we hope that gives us time to work out what is needed from us and from Lady Leffoy to end this thing. This curse. It's not... I don't like it. But when the alternative is something like what happened to Bill, happening again... or worse..." Or, of course, himself, he remembered. He knew it was rather unlikely that any sacrifice he made could save the Loveday children, but had not satisfied his conscience on the point.
"Marcus knew," Lizzie said, quite firmly. "Marcus knew that they wanted everything that was ours. It was Mercy to start with and that wasn't enough. And then he said that it would be him, and it was him and that wasn't enough? So Kat won't be enough and what then? Bill and Matty of course and Annie... are you going to give them your daughter and your sons? Is Frank going to give them his?"
"We are not going to give them Kat," Isaac said, although he felt rather sick: he didn't have good answers to Lizzie's worries. "We're not giving them anyone, Lizzie. And they don't want us to. We're asking Florian and Kat if they'd agree to this, and if they do we will start preparing them for the marriage they might have chosen anyway. I saw a composite at the hospital. They'd probably try something anyway, and the chart is better than that many successful marriages and this way they will have had every chance we can give them for at least a firm, lifelong friendship at the end of it all." He sighed, recognising that he was essentially parroting the arguments Wilkes had made to him. But then, since he'd been convinced by them, what else was there to do? "This is the least bad thing."
"And then, that's all?" Lizzie asked softly. "It's over? This whole thing, this thing that no one believed in except Marcus, and now we suddenly all do believe except this is it?"
"No," Isaac said. "We just have some time."
"Some time," Lizzie repeated, and stared into the distance. "How much? Enough time that Bill can grow up different? That he won't go out there one day too?"
Isaac nodded. "We hope so," he said, and grimaced at his own lie. Bill needed time because he needed to grow up to do whatever his role in ending the curse would be, and whatever that was wouldn't be easy. "This is the only way that we can think of that isn't going to mean that the next time any of us, or any of them, get sick or hurt, that we'll have a normal, usual, chance, to get on with living our lives. Yvon Leffoy nearly died of something he shouldn't have, Lizzie, and Bill too."
Lizzie was crying in earnest; her trembling woke Matthew and he started to yell. Alice met Isaac's eyes for a moment but she looked away and moved around the table to Lizzie to take the baby from her. "I have to do this, don't I?" she asked. "She has to do this. I have to do this to my daughter."
Isaac didn't say anything for a little while, and then he asked "Can you write to her?"
"Can I see her?" Lizzie asked in reply.
"Of course," Isaac said. "But we're going to have to do this as soon as possible. She needs a chance to think about it, whatever chance we can give her."
"Think about it?" Lizzie hissed. "Either this... this mess is going to kill my children, or it isn't, Isaac Bradbury. If it isn't, why should she think about it? If it is then she doesn't have a choice, does she? What is there to think about?"
"We aren't going to force the children to do this," Isaac replied. "Neither family. If they won't, then we will have to do something else. Find another way."
"You can't ask a twelve year old to make that choice, Isaac," Alice said forcefully, looking up from the sobbing baby. "And neither should Lady Leffoy. There's no choice that either of them can honestly make other than doing it, and all that you will have done is trap the children in it, by making them think they chose it freely."
"Marcus has already died the other way," Lizzie said. "She has to do this. And she will want to. I'll write to her."
"May I see the letter?" Isaac asked, very uneasy about Lizzie's sudden conclusion.
"No!" Lizzie cried and rose from her seat. "This is my daughter! My sons! My children! I am her mother. She's not your daughter, neither of you. I know her best and I should be the one to do this."
"Very well," Isaac said with serious but unexpressable misgivings, and stood aside to let her past. "I am so sorry, Elizabeth," he said as she passed him in tears. She didn't reply.
Only after Lizzie's footsteps had almost faded away, Alice looked up again from Matthew and told Isaac in an icy tone "That went well."
"What are we supposed to do?" Isaac replied. "We all saw Bill. He won't survive that again, Alice. And God knows how it has happened, but somehow it has come about that Kat and Florian can do this and do it with every chance of actually being happy. Every chance that everyone else gets, anyway. And his mother... or his father rather... his parent agrees on how to do this." He rubbed his hand against his forehead. He'd said all this to his wife the previous night.
"Sssh," Alice murmured to the baby. "Mummy will be back in a little while." She asked Isaac: "If this was our own daughter, if this was Sally, would you do this?"
Isaac frowned and sat down at the other end of the table. "I think so," he said.
"I hope so," Alice said. "If it's the right thing to do for Kat, it would have to be the right thing for Sal, wouldn't it?"
"What are you getting at?" Isaac asked.
"Whether you're the kind of father I thought you were," Alice replied.
Isaac sat down and put his head in his hands for a couple of seconds. "Probably not," he eventually said.
Alice drummed her hands lightly on the table. "How different do you think Lady Leffoy is from her sister?" she asked quietly.
"Fairly," Isaac said. "I hope very. If this could end with getting Mercy away from that woman..."
Alice exhaled and hit the table harder in exasperation. "That's just a fantasy," she said. "Don't do that. Don't! Don't try and make this all right by trying to shoehorn it into solving every problem in the family. It might delay the Pendry curse for a while. But it's not going to save Mercy or get her and Arianwen out of that house. It's not going to undo all the damage Marcus did to Bill in a stroke. And even if it did solve everything, we still will have arranged an engagement between children. And it's going to leave us with a very confused little girl who has already been hurt goodness knows how badly by a father and mother who condemned in her everything they praised in her brother."
Isaac pressed his lips together and remained quiet for some moments. He could talk to Alice when she was this angry, as long as he gave her space to say what she wanted to say, and didn't push back too hard.
"We have time, I think," Isaac began. "Not much. But time to talk to Kat about this. To at least meet the boy himself. Lady Leffoy wants us to have him visit, and Kat to spend time there as well. We need to talk to Annie and Bill. Mercy if we can. I am going to need your help with this, Ally."
Alice grimaced and looked to the side, towards her kitchen window. "You are," she said. She shrugged at him. "How can you let Lizzie of all people write that letter?"
"How can I not?" Isaac asked.
"I suppose," Alice agreed. She rose. "I'll write to her too though."
"You do that," Isaac said. "Please. I have to instruct my solicitors."
"'From each according to his ability' after all," Alice said softly as she left the room.
"That wasn't what I meant," Isaac said evenly, but she had already gone.
bradburyfamily (Alice Bradbury), scripsit (Elizabeth Loveday) and bydegrees