Christmas Narrative!
Who: Honoria Edwards
What: Narrative, detailing this professor's Christmas Eve
Where: A cemetery in East Bergholt
When: 24 December 2009, dusk
Rating: PG—for Pretty Gloomy!



Charles was dead, to begin with, yet there truly was a bit of doubt about that. There never had been any register of burial, no clergyman, clerk, or undertaker to sign if there had. The chief mourner had been nobody of any consequence, but Honoria herself, and her signature had been no more than a black dress, which she wore for a single year, before she traded her skirts for a pair of Charles’ own forgotten breeches. Her brother, Charles had gone missing at sea, and was likely to be as dead as a door-nail.

That had been in her fifteenth year, and many lifetimes ago; long before she had seen the world and published her books, long before she had been twice a wife and six times a mother, before she had become a boy and then a girl once more, before the breeches, the parasols, the veils, and the endless black of mourning. Honoria believed Charles was dead? Of course she did. How could it be otherwise? And still, the seed of doubt had sprouted deep within her heart over these many long, lonely years, and grown into a bright green sapling of hope. In the winter months, when the snow drizzled onto sooty rooftops, and froze the dead limbs of trees in the midst of their throes of autumnal agony, the sapling in her heart drew a shroud over itself and sunk inward; but in the summertime, when the spring leaves had begun blowing softly in breezes and the geese returned to splash cheerily in the Mairfield pond, and Hornoria might venture envision the youthful face of her brother coming round the garden wall, the sapling grew another few marks, and its frail, leafy arms shivered. Every year. Every year the cycle progressed as the year before, and Honoria’s doubt became ever more the pretense of hope.

In the cemetery adjacent to the East Bergholt Church of Saint Mary the Virgin, two headstones stand erect, near the center of the yard. They have been posted in a position which is clearly meant to indicate the close relation of the persons interred below, and yet they each lean two barely perceptible degrees away from one another. The one on the left reads “Ada Carstone,” and is more worn and blacker around the edges than the one on the right, “Lawrence Carstone.” Between them, the space has grown over the years, as the wind and rain have beat the stones apart and the earth between into a shallow canal, yet they remain closer to one another than to any of the other stones in the yard.

Christmas Eve, 1899, and snow has settled in between the rows of gray markers, while flakes lay still in midair, turning everything a murky sort of white in the dim light of dusk. The woman in black lace makes not a sound, as her pointed boots imprint themselves upon the snow. Each track a little triangle, making a trail of barely visible little arrows from the iron gate, up the slight slope to the middle of the cemetery, where her black-clad knees rest into the frozen white of the earth. The driver and the carriage wait on the road, far out of sight and earshot, and the girl with the drooping black umbrella stands several paces behind her lady, holding the black metal cage in other gloved hand. The chirp of animatronic life and the click of mechanical spider legs against the bars fade when the woman in black lace plants her knees before the headstones. Cold and gray, the night settles slowly down around them, and the girl with the umbrella, who shifts quietly in her boots, shivers the wet from her shoulders.

There was a time when all was warm and dry, when Honoria wore lush gold and green gowns, when her hair was all soft curls and her lips rosy round buds that seemed made for kisses. There was a time when she was not only the lady in black, but the Lady Edwards, wife of Sir Harold Edwards, a pair of aristocrats, expatriations, explorers, and revered as a force of great influence abroad in Her Majesty’s Great Empire. There was time when Christmases were celebrated in the heat of the Indian jungles, the sands of the Egyptian desert, and in the English estate of their own, with tall, immaculate evergreens, brilliantly lighted by a multitude of little tapers, and everywhere sparkled and glittered with bright objects. That time had been short, barely six years, before the guns of the Syrian desert were fired and Honoria was sent into the black draperies of young widowhood. Where her Uncle Nemo had once taught her to love the unknown and to yearn for exploration, Harold Edwards had taught her the mechanics of the trade, and within the span of those short six years following her brother’s disappearance, she lost them both to the perils of mortal life. Six years, and five times the joy and devastation of almost-motherhood, and once the sorrow of first-time widowhood, and nothing to show for it but a London house, a vacant estate, a small dirigible with a mechanical spider to perch on the gunwale, a blackened and bruised sense of pride.

Retreat is often the most numbing means of solace, and for Honoria Edwards, retreat had only one direction--back into the unknown, this time to Cairo and the hot and dry of Lord Cromer’s stronghold. In Egypt, the sun never seemed to leave her side, and though it burned when she was careless, she wore simple white dresses and pink veils. In the arms of he who would forever go nameless in her memory--for she could never dredge up the letters, neither in English nor Arabic, forever after the events of the Sahara--she both aged several years and took on the most youthful coloring she would know. Honoria believed he, too, was dead? Of course she did. How could it be otherwise? But still, like her brother, he had vanished with the day’s dying sun, leaving her alone and sunburnt in the desert with the blood of her very last lost chance at motherhood and the very last tears she would ever shed onto the lap of the very last white dress she would ever wear.

In the cemetery adjacent to the East Bergholt Church of Saint Mary the Virgin, two headstones stand erect, near the center of the yard. They are the headstones of the black-clad woman’s parents, but she does not mourn them over the crumbling stone and slushing snow. She does not remember Ada Carstone, though the woman's portrait still hangs over the blackened mantel of Mairsfield, even after the fire, and she does not know Lawrence Carstone, though she remembers the sound of her father's pacing boots behind the closed doors of his study. No, the bouquet of ten snowdrops she lays in the shallow canal between the stones are pressed into the snow for others. Others, who are buried below the mysterious tides of the Atlantic and the shifting sands of the Egyptian desert and the black veils of memory. For Nemo and the Six Lost Ones, for Harold and Charles, and for him, she lays down flowers so white that the image melts and is lost almost immediately into the snowy white between the stones. And in the whole of that wintery cemetery, only her eyes remain dry.

Standing, the woman in black lace brushes the wet from her knees, pulls the black cape tight around her throat, and, without glancing at the girl with the umbrella, begins the quick trot down the slope. The dark has made itself comfortable over the cemetery, but the light of the rising moon reflecting off of the snowy yard is lantern enough to guide the pair to the gate, where the carriage driver is stamping his feet against the chill, and the distant sound of late carolers singing of joys to the world floats in on the Christmas Eve air.

A mustached man with cape and cane passes through the gate, with his lady, bedecked in furs, on his arm, tips his tophat at the lady in black lace, and offers a half-hearted “Merry Christmas,” in a tone made appropriate--not without little effort--for those paying a visit to the long lost and dearly departed on this eve of merrymaking.

“Humbug!” Honoria answers, shaking the snow-laden kinks of her hair and passing through the iron gates, the shivering girl with the umbrella trotting several paces behind.