CHAPTER III. THE CHRONOLOGICAL ORDER

   Once upon a time there was a woman –He started. The flames, such as burning hands massaging my knees, were a pain reliever against the stubborn cold of the harsh winter, already yielding. Protch, who had placed himself so that he did not prevent their warm tongues to lick me, smiled. The clear morning was changing tiresomely into afternoon-... who uttered her first cry, without irreverence, in the presbytery of what is an old cathedral. Thus, sheltered in St. Magnus’ red sandstone of the tears of November which struck with fury outside, when the century was a small child barely weaned, the first beggar arrived at this dingy room of horror, Earth, claiming her right to see the light where she would like to. She was a girl of matter that never neglected energy; a woman like women are: lucid, serene and courageous. She could have emerged in a warm home or on the treacherous streets that were waiting for her, but in her freedom she decided to be born in a temple, as if it were written that only in the most sacred enclosures all explosions must burst, and she was as creator of those who came later, mother of us all, as the Universe. The erratic souls, which empty and abandoned, ever to her have gone, always saw her woman among women, a lady. When her tiny steps ever bend the arc of any street, the taciturn passer-by stops to contemplate her, with a respectful look. In the view of her venerable way of walking and her wrinkles man is shaken by the weight of the first woman, of every story that mentions her.

- But I'm losing the thread. I don't know if I will be able to tell it.

   Adam Oakes, her father, then pastor of the Presbyterian Church in Kirkwall, in the Orkneys, must have been, in the words of his own daughter, seductive as the star perfume, beautiful as the devil. What is known with certainty, he was a smart exceptional speaker who caught with his impeccable argument, an apologist of intricate dogmatic labyrinths. So he winnowed the wheat of incontrovertible certainty from which the sins of men ever stained it that he earned a reputation for being able to make intelligible the mysteries of divinity, as he could have chosen to illuminate his proselytes on the truths of alchemy, the lies of time and space or the own inexistence of God; a useful man, a... dangerous man. Perhaps therefore exiled in that distant land.  

  They say, Protch, that when Adam was twenty-seven years, in a languid and cold dawn of a rainy and sickly February, a ballet company perhaps disoriented landed as a shipwreck in the harbour without light of the sleeping city. They say that Adam, who left recent fevers and headaches and who wandered close to the sea, believed that he was delirious when a profile that the sleepy rays of the East highlighted woke him the image of a star in the moment of blending in with the yellow of the day and evaporating. And surely he was not wrong, because not in vain he had just met the golden reflections of Estella, Estella Frame, one of the emerging suns in dancing at the beginning of the century. 

   That day in February ended up being our beginning. Mr. Oakes had long time ahead and decided to attend the evening performance of the Nutcracker. The theater was almost empty and of all the available space he chose a third-row seat. He had to wait until the second act to see her, because his lady was the fairy of sugar.

   Whenever Estella danced, the proscenium trembled. The wood, to the rhythm of her tiny feet, fluttered without noise; the stage was swaying to the same soft cadence of stretches, twists, and sliding. The Kingdom of Sweets tap-danced mealy to the beat of the uniform celesta. Whenever Estella danced, the heart was soft and sensitive. Adam’s courage sank to the same sound of her feet, which marked him heartbeats. He knew without a doubt that whenever Estella danced, the proscenium trembled and his virgin feelings, stage without wood to be opened, oppressed him like Eve should have oppressed in her Eden, in her nakedness of light between apples, trees and snakes.

   Finally the curtain fell, and in the dull silence of the sudden footsteps that were going away, he remembered other feet that clip-clap-clop, clip-clap-clop, rhythmically harmonized the naïve look of the fairy with his heart forever broken. He was going to retire reluctantly when his gaze landed a second behind-the-scenes. Was that not Gordon Traves? The same alcoholic look and hesitant steps across the stage. Bony and sour-faced and of an offensive nature, he doubted to greet him when he realized that Gordon owed him a favor and he had a new idea. He reviewed the list of names in the cast: fairy of sugar-Estella Frame and boldly walked the few meters that separated him from Mr. Traves.

− "Good night, Gordon."

− "Good night, Mr. Oakes. Did you like the show?"

− "I liked the second act so much that I wanted to congratulate Miss Frame. Would it be possible?"

− "She must still be changing. Wait for me here, I will tell you."

   It was a frantic waiting, but ephemeral. In a corridor on the right were the dressing rooms.  To his shy way of entering answered a shining face, so much more shining for being stripped of make-up. First timid greetings. Adam effusively greeting her with his red face. Gordon, discreetly, retires.

   She saw a face bright and attractive as a summer afternoon must be, an insecure gentleman, hesitant but with a warm voice that kept touching his hair. Mr. Traves does not know what happened in the dressing room, but knows that Mr. Oakes took almost an hour to get out. But surely inside there must have been a space-time singularity that originated our big bang.

   The priest emerged at the end with an illuminated face and an aching heart. He could never forget her. It was vain his decision not to go to the harbour to say goodbye to her. Impossible to say goodbye to whom has got inside forever. He spent long days of troubles and sorrows. It gave him for thinking if she would be feeling the same. His anguish was reflected in his sermons: all the life of Christ was passion and hopes the latest Calvary. But he spoke more about death than about the resurrection. Whoever heard him those days should know a lot about nails and thorns, sandy hills, prominent crosses and impregnable graves. It seemed impossible that way to resurrect from the dead.

  And February passed as a diamond broomstick in his soul. And long were for him the seasons. Spring of winds, summer of shadows. Autumn had become cold and rainy and the dancer would forever be dancing in his life because whenever Estella danced, she captured the pulse; and the blood was young again and dressed as a girl. Even the downpour of that damp November started to prance. And the rhythmic rain of that November 7 harmonized with his cold tears while he walked among chalices in that sacred place.

   The worship had finished more than one hour ago. The Temple was in those times of peace as a traveler inside of a boat was with sea in calm but lashed by rain. But suddenly he sharpened his ears. There sounded a few determined steps advancing by the aisle, discrete, rhythmic, musical, trotting, as if the ground was rising so who stepped on it would not have to make efforts. His heart almost stopped: they looked like ballet steps. There she was, up to the presbytery, Estella illuminated by a light perhaps fragile but imperishable. But he could not help but notice the more singular: the goddess Moon was full, Artemis had been completed with a creature, who surely also danced in her womb as had danced her mother nine months in his heart. He wished ardently that the child was his. And at that moment a star shone with force on her face when he heard her say:

− "I love you, Adam. I have spent these months making efforts so that it wasn't so and when I decided to make the trip, perhaps it is too late. It wouldn’t be fair if I didn’t tell you: the child is yours."

   And then he felt the need to utter the same words to express what he felt, so that the soft echo of what he wanted to say caressed his heart the rest of his life:

− "I love you, Estella. Nine months I've loved you, but without making any efforts that it was not so, efforts that I knew were useless."

− "Then, for Christ’s sake, take me to a hospital. I feel it is imminent..."

   But at that time it happened. It was no longer possible to go down the staircase of the presbytery. Mars Ultor, the Avenger Mars, hurried to be born on that Olympus. His mother had hardly to make efforts while Adam helped more with his hope than with his strength. He broke completely when he saw how his daughter came to life, because a girl she was, like the Universe. Adam was also sitting on the floor of that sacred place to accompany the mother, who didn't take long to recover; and their daughter, who came with so much will to this temple of life that she hardly cried. He had to prolong that eternity:

− "Estella, look at me. I want to take care of the girl and spend the rest of my life with you. I promise to love you and respect you all the days of my life. If you want to make me the happiest man in the world, answer yes."

− "Adam... This girl is as yours as she is mine. If you want to take care of her, I will always let you. But I also love you. I just need some security: to know that you will never separate from me."

− "When you're recovered, you will enter my house, which already will be our house. Whatever it is what life has in store for me, I want to live it at your side."

− “I will enter your house. I mean our house −and looking tenderly at the fragile heart that was beating in her arms, she added−: What shall we call her?

   It took them almost half an hour there, in the presbytery of St. Magnus, deciding names, with the disturbing security that they already belonged to each other. And at the end they agreed in one, when he, in his faithfulness to his love for Christ and the characters that had surrounded him, suggested:

− 'Madeleine'.

  Madeleine. We have never called her so, but so was she named. Two hours after childbirth, Estella thought she was able to enter her new home. Because also a beggar tells you, Protch, that you can never consider that a home is yours until you know that you've definitely entered the heart of whomsoever also dwells there. It wasn't very far, but they went by taxi, which by then the first already began to appear in Kirkwall. And her new home she found it comfortable and safe, her daughter in her arms, the man she loved sitting beside her. Only then they started to kiss, frantically trying to recover the lost months. And in those moments he spoke of marriage. She accepted and not before that time she felt protected, protected for the future, as if she had the advance that one day she would need protection.

   They were married on Saturday, December 8. Estella was radiant. The light that shone on her must be as that of a new star releasing its first energy. Adam was like a softer light, but equally firm. And St. Magnus had never been more solemn, the girl who was born there attending the wedding of her parents. The whole world was a temple and all was light, stained glass, hearts, and miracle.

   They were a happy couple as long as they were themselves and small Madeleine grew strong and learning to release light and beauty. Adam’s sermons spoke now of wonders, of the arrival of God among men when finally the verb had decided to turn into flesh, of teachings and wisdom, that life had sense, of resurrection and eternity. Madeleine learned to speak before learning to walk, chewing more difficult pronunciation words without difficulty. The happiness that their parents had had to arrive to her, and inside her it stayed forever, even in significant moments, because you could smudge a glass but the crystal, if it was quite solid, remained. Her life has been full of gods and the first were the Lares, the gods of the household, home that her parents consecrated with happiness.

   Her education was a way of many twists, but without any potholes, more of letters that of numbers, learning like everyone more easily what you want to learn, but she, to a greater or lesser extent, was interested in almost everything. But one day, when she was hardly six, her life began to change because everything changed to her inside. A friend suggested her to protect from the sun with her hand. And she repeated the same gesture at night. And then there came the disturbing echo of first words in her mind that would make her think forever. Thus, her life, and ours, changed definitely, by a mental image on a moonless night.

− "My hand is greater than the universe" –she never knew where that madness had come from. But she felt certain that that was indeed so. And she underwent immediate panic. She knew that any logical person, scientist, or somebody with some common sense would be against such idea. She thought that she was going crazy. It wasn't the only time that she thought that.

   Several days later she came to an agreement with herself: that her hand was equal to the universe. But this convenience did not satisfy her: "come on, you fool, acknowledge at once that your hand is smaller than the universe, and only then you will recover your sanity." "In addition –she found new arguments for her madness− it also expands or shrinks, warms up or cools, the lines of life orbiting around a core of fire, your crazy heart."

   But she never found the calm that was so close. After several months, she walked away finally of the absurd quantities, and finally formulated her turbulent phrase thus: "my hand is another universe". But this pact with her sanity never convinced her at all. And it took her several years to know that indeed this crazy idea would mark her life and her hand would be her universe, even years before she was on the street.

  But if madness was not in her, it was always very close. About to be eight years old, one autumn evening her mother broke the peace of home giving an unexpected shout. First it was a visual hallucination. Only years later they knew that Estella believed firmly having seen the devil in one of the showcases of the dining room. And soon, too soon, she began to hear strange voices inside. She still did not feel persecuted. They immediately went to the doctors. His husband felt perfectly how they did not want to alarm, until one doctor finally took courage. It was an uncertain diagnosis, but he believed what she was experiencing could be, by the symptoms, catatonic schizophrenia. The verdict could not be more dramatic.

− "Adam, my love –she said when they finally were alone−, I don't know how long I will continue being me, or what will happen to me. But while I stay lucid I will repeat every day: I love you, I love you and I love you. And if you think it is not enough I will start again: I love you, I love you and I love you..."

− "Estella, my life, I solemnly promise that I will always be by your side. And I'll not let you be the only one saying it: I love you, I love you and I love you."

   I love you, I love you and I love you. That was always the leitmotiv of their lives. She never got better, but her deterioration was slow and always had at least one moment of lucidity in the day to repeat her three I love you, until he died, 21 years later. They didn’t tell all the truth to their daughter, who only slowly discovered it and learned to live by herself.

   Adam found it much harder to accept. He never lost his faith, but he realized that it was transforming until even open or dimly, you could feel in his sermons a cynical transformation of the Five Solae of the Protestant.

   Sola Scriptura, only the Scriptures explained Christ, finished in accepting any writing that spoke of Him, even against Him, because from Him and for Him the light of truth shone proud in every lie, the beauty of His supreme acts of redemption and I am the way, the truth and the life ended up being for him sola veritas, sola vita, sola via.

   Solus Christus not only meant not having faith in faith, prayers, or in the Church or the institutions but also not to believe in any other god that was not Christ.  He never dared to say it in the pulpit, but for him not even the Yahweh of the Old Testament was already his father. From that sick and psychotic Father clearly could not have been born God Love. He began to sense that any Christian confession would inevitably lose all sense if it was still considering the first half of the Bible.

   Sola Gratia was immediately transformed into what Reform had wanted to avoid. And he understood that if Christ was fair, he should be listening to their children by the ears of grace and good deeds.

   Sola Fide he quickly began to read as the absolute cruelty of the god in which he had always believed, and only with difficulty could move from there, because if he did not transform it, everything that he believed in would not make sense anymore. Only he who has faith can be saved. He looked at his daughter, who was then reading absorbed something at his side. All earthly parent would save his children from any hell, from any torture and would lead them into a path of bliss. But if my daughter one day does not believe in me, I would also try to save her if her eternity would be mine to give. He saw that he was creating a personal religion, but he realized that contrary to everything that he had found in the Scriptures, all faith is finally a use of personal interpretation.

   Soli Deo Gloria was his last transformation. Initially it had been sought to preserve the worship of God from all filthiness idolatrous or superstitious. But in the end he realized that paganism also talked about reasons to love Him. And as he was finishing his road he was also considering some other things to believe in, mainly experience, all his experience in life; and love, the great creator, the great transformer. And at the end you could have read him Soli Amori gloria.

   Here's how the Five Solae were finally transformed and perverted but only so he was able to preserve until his last breath his faith, his Solae, his Christ the great master, and always and only him love, love in abundance.

   In the transition from her early years to adolescence, Madeleine learned to navigate on the crises of her parents. Estella could only worsen and she remained for several hours motionless and expressionless, but she continued having at least one moment of lucidity in the day when she took the opportunity to reaffirm her love for Adam and for flooding her daughter with words of true love.

   To accompany her father, she began to read the Bible. Once she finished it but it was frequent that she restarted it and she could read but the first pages of Genesis. He put on her shoulders all his longing for faith and learned to trust the serene right mind of his daughter soon. So, with all that theology it was normal that she started from a child to create her own cosmogony.

   And it wasn't far the day that her hand began to be her universe. But almost always causality is disguised by chance.  She was a hot afternoon with a friend on the terrace of a bar, to whom a few minutes later a wasp stung in the middle finger. Her hand was swelling, especially the fingers, and she had to go to the doctors. Little did she remember of the long explanation given to them by the latter. But she believed that it was a case of allergy. Once she was cured, her friend showed her the hand. Her first reading was to start with a large swelling not hiding, however, the lines of the palm. And then she had, looking at her friend, a strong shaking. She could see clearly what was going to happen, and that first time she uttered out loud what she was seeing:

− "You will find the love of your life much earlier than you expect."

   Her friend looked at her estranged and faithless. And it was only a week later when she found the man that would accompany her the rest of her life. Madeleine learned to always hit the target, but it took her much longer to see that although she never failed in general, sometimes she needed to interpret it. Fearful she decided to read one day her own destiny and she was wrong. She believed that her own lines told her that she would never find love but the truth is, Protch, that she did find it, but she was never able to hold it.

   Among the belongings of his father, who by that time was filling the library with every kind of mystery book, as in all he perceived a truth about his Solus Christus, she found some treatise about palmistry, and something more: several books on the Tarot cards. She soon learned about the 22 major arcana. About minor arcana she investigated long after. She soon purchased her first Tarot. And although she has had more, this first one she has always preserved it. She has even read the cards to me with that deck of cards. As initially she was not dependant on it, she used to guess for free.

  But her mother got worse and although the family economy was always solid, she wanted to make a living. At the age of 16, she found her first job in a bakery. And she meditated there, from 9 to 2, handing out loaves without ever tiring of the wonderful scent of the freshly baked bread, what she would do when her education was over, because in those years she knew very well that it wouldn't be possible for a woman to study more. But with some economic troubles, her life had begun to depend on her, and once school time was over, in her spare time she also started to charge for her predictions.

  Next to the harbour, where ferries went to the other islands, there were sometimes stalls and attractions. One warm afternoon, with no more tools than her hand and her ability, she sat down on the pavement and there she began to guess, from the lines of the palm and Tarot. To her one day some kind soul around lent a tent to mount her own business, to which she went in the afternoon daily after leaving the bakery. She used to be right and soon she created a reputation. She was already at 17, Mistress Oakes, seer of the future, and thus, Mistress Oakes, everybody has always known her, even her fellow mates. She never had a husband or children, but perhaps grandchildren, and all of us have been, but always she has been called mistress.


 

   So far Protch had not interrupted, and then neither did he. But often I noted his urge to tell me something.

−Tell me, Protch.

-I will always call her Mistress Oakes then.

−But you want to tell me something else, isn't it?

−I was thinking... I guess that she ended in Hazington... and what you have told me about her hand and the universe, and that she has some symbolic grandchildren, I don't know why, has given me for thinking. My hand was read a few years ago by a woman beggar, and she told me something so incomprehensible but that worries me... Let's see, your fellow mate has more or less your stature, is not thick, and has grey hair?

−She does, Protch. I don't know what she told you or if you want to tell me about it, but if you do, I swear to listen with respect.

−You know that Maude and I have never been parents and what she said was this sentence: "You will be grandparents although you never had any children."

   You will be grandparents although you never had any children. How would I tell Protch that I knew very well that that possibility was in his hands with only wanting to accept it? I did not know that Mistress Oakes had told him that, but I no longer had any doubt that it had been her.

−I believe it was my fellow mate, Protch, and even if you do not know her, I suspect that you know half of us. Have patience. Even I may know something about that enigmatic phrase and what she meant with it. Her good and bad prophecies always have some truth.  I come to your house and yet I discover something new about my fellow mates. But so it had to be because everything is in everyone. I'm telling you a story and now you're telling me another. It was her, Protch. I would put the hand in the fire. And you're going to know everything that I know and you want to know. I only ask that you wait a bit.


 

   At the age of 18, her normal life had not changed, but two things came into her story with strength, to twist it. She met Joe Scully and her mother was interned. There was no other solution that making Estella enter a sanatorium. She heard then for the first time of Basin Hall, the best psychiatric hospital, where they would always achieve that she was no worse, they would examine her, and if it was possible they would heal her. She knew that Basin Hall was a small village in the city of Hazington, much more to the South, where her father and she went frequently to visit her. He saw in those years our city for the first time and already had the desire to stay close to her mother.

  Shortly after having her own tent next to the harbour she met a key man in her life. He visited many cities, this globetrotter, with his attraction: Scully, the maze of mirrors. It cost her to find her way out the first time she entered, an afternoon that she had enough money, and his owner had to enter to rescue her. Thus, she met Joe. They agreed to talk and immediately became friends.

  Joe Scully did not have a single striking feature but the whole always made him very attractive for women. Very well knew that Mistress Oakes, who soon recognized in him the man of her life. They soon talked about love, because as usual, even the most cynical fall in love, and that meeting with her had not left him unscathed. All his life he loved her, but maybe to love was not enough. In one of his first conversations already he let her clear he was ambitious.

− "You asked me about my projects in life. Well, if I can't find a wealthy woman, I do not think that I ever marry. Do not look at me with those eyes, my life. I love you, but my poor economy and yours together; we would not go too far."

   Joe told her he had been wandering around the country and that it was not the first time that he came to the Orkneys, but he lived in Hazington. For her he would stay all summer, but no more he could linger. He would return the following year, but his attraction was not like a merry-go-round. His charm was novelty. But settled in the same place in the same city every day soon would make the public lose all its fascination. Mirrors have no magic when you no longer get lost and the superstition of people leads the person who sought oneself to immediately repel them, lest they attract bad luck.

  In October he went away for the first time, and she learned to handle without him until March. But she knew that Joe only returned to Kirkwall for her and of his love she was always sure, as sure as she was that he was a womanizer. Whenever he came back, he brought in his clothes a perfume that was not his but Mistress Oakes soon learned to appreciate the essential: he was her only love. None of his infidelities was important while love remained, and the months they saw each other he had never betrayed her, she was sure.

  So they were for several years. Each spring she was lost in the same maze of doubt, until she saw him return as his mirrors. In the end she considered seriously moving to Hazington, for her mother and for Joe. And he who knew her worries, one day told her that she could find a job in a bakery in Templar Village, where she would earn enough to live somewhere for rent. Thus, with 22 years, she came one day to our city. Her father already knew of her impossible love for that Scully, and seeing that she would have a house and a job objected nothing.

   She spent a long year next to the Umbra Terrae Boulevard. If you do not know it, Protch, I will tell you that it is an earthy area along the river where elms and ash trees live in the harmony of their love, long before the separation. The origin of its name is uncertain, but I have heard that the Templar named it Umbrae Terra, land of shadows, which would be logical in the most shady river area. Perhaps then popular ignorance of Latin moved the diphthong to the second name. Because such as it is, Umbra Terrae would mean the shadow of the Earth, and I don't know if once you've wondered, Protch, why you can’t see the half of the moon when it is waxing or waning. And I have made sure from those who know about these things better that the part that is not seen is precisely the shadow of the Earth. In those years already lived there some beggars, but still the City Council had not transformed it into a well-kept promenade area, in the park which was later.

   She learned soon that love, true love, sickened man's heart and crazily it flies at the top with no sanity taking it down, he who is burning wants to continue burning and although circumstances may break a couple, love continues its work of banditry inside until  only time can remove it.

  When she was nearly 23, she couldn't find Joe already at the beginning of autumn at his home in Arcade. And it was shortly after it arrived when she found him by chance one day near St Mary, where she used to go to read the fortune. He was in the arms of a blond, tall woman of delicate appearance, but flourishing. He saw her and appointed to meet her an hour later in a bar in the town.

− "Maddie –He told her at last. Only he gave her that name and since then she did not allow anyone more to do it−, I will always love you, I want to start out there, and make you sure of what I feel. Look, we can always be together. But the lady you've seen next to me is my wife, Beatrice” -Mistress Oakes felt that her vision came and went in waves. Broken heart was watering her cheeks−. "We got married a month ago:  On October 27"

  And little else. She had then to stop looking for him. The few moments in which they continued to love passionately, each time more spaced, were useless. Since she came to feel bad about Beatrice and even wanted what never happened: that Joe loved his wife. The Scully lived of what little he earned and a low pension that her father gave her, and he took her story so badly that assured that she would not receive anything after his death. His daughter had run after one such Joe Scully, it seems that they were his words, and had chosen a path where his father wasn't willing to follow. Poor wealth. So many times you fall in love with gold and you do not realize that its chips are rotting. In the end Joe hadn’t found it useful to have found a rich girl. And money ruined Mistress Oakes’ life, first of all of us.

  That December was particularly cold and hostile. Bitterness, depression, dry sadness almost defeated her. It was also the year of the great crash of the stock market, which in her case coincided with a downsizing with which she lost her job and barely got to live indoors. But she didn’t feel like returning to her father’s house. The year was almost over when she found places to open her hand for charity. The only indignity would be not to live again by herself one day. She got used to the shame of the streets, but she never stopped helping from the little or much she got, divining the future. She always found matches to light her biggest shades and soon realized that it would be better to also leave the shelter of her room in Umbra Terrae, and get down at the end to that home foreseen and feared, a fire in the empty space without roof of the Boulevard, with the shelter of trees, the river and the first beggars that she met. But Verôme came also to the first four who did not choose it. Unexpectedly, she started to find areas to sleep more secluded, when on the last night of the year there was the spectacle of a frost of winter really lit by the stars. And at the end she preferred to stay alone with the infinite glass, starred, breathing bluish lights; she was not separated from the universe: there was still a hope. Life had become an opaque stonewall where light did not reach, but liberty would timidly circumvent it.

  I don't know much of her early years on the street, where she used to move or what were her fears or hopes. By somewhere she walked unbreakable when in September a girl was born who, unknowingly, would be her inseparable fellow mate. She had already been reached by some inexplicable eight words, doubting her reason to make you always question her sanity at the time she found also the first libertines.


 

   Nike did not know much about the existence of Shipster and did not tell anything to Protch. He could basically be defined as an exploiter of beggars. Mistress Oakes knew him one day and was taught to sell tobacco. It was given her by Shipster and she sold it on any sidewalk in Castle Road. At night the trafficker was left with 60% of earnings and she knew that she could not protest: it was that or nothing. So she was several years, with enough money to occasionally go to Kirkwall to see her father, whom she always managed to conceal that she was in the streets. With the charity, with the lines of the hand, with the cards, with tobacco; also with love never-extinguished but hardly pushed aside, Madeleine Oakes could never be defeated and earned her life as she could, but every day thanking the light of a new dawn. Life was fencing and she armed herself with swords. The dawn of beauty always caressing her shoulder, her faith in freedom which was even in the hardness of the faces of beggars surrounding her, she lived a learning that would not have given her years of school, and that she knew how to transmit to the seven who came after her, or anyone who went to the fire of her heart to warm.


 

   When she had been more than six years on the street, taking revenue from all the small jobs done, she went to Kirkwall among the knives of a wintry and treacherous autumn. Her father suddenly began to suffer migraines, or so it seemed. But he was fast to guess that his life was ending. He supposed that it would be in November, in the month that had happened many of the most important things in his life. And one night he took courage to talk face to face with his daughter.

− "Madeleine, my love, leave what you're doing –she was then busy with supper−. Sit next to me and look at me. Not always have I been responsible with you. You know that the threads that weave my life broke when the light from the universe of your mother was shading. But while she was at my side I always kept the hope to see her dance again one day. The dancer is no longer and also my stage is trembling and I will not live many days. I cannot leave you many things but a home, if that is your wish. You've always been so free that in my last moments I doubt even of what your desires are. Maybe you prefer to continue in Hazington, in the streets."

− "I didn't know that you knew it. Forgive me if I've hurt you."

-"You couldn’t always hide it. Friends here, sometimes travelers, informed me. But I would never have reproached you. I'm going to die, but there is still your future. Tell me what you really prefer."

   It was difficult to answer. Despite her many sorrows, in the streets she was finding reasons to fight and be herself. She sensed that she would be more with fewer amenities. Her father noticed that she didn't know what to answer, but was able to reach an agreement with her. He would leave her the old house in Kirkwall in case one day she needed it; and executors who would be responsible to bequeath her the little money that he owned. She had to live several years in the temptation to go for her inheritance and however, favorite pupil of misery, she never wanted to move away from the double lullabies of the street, the mother, and the street, the whore.

   It was actually when November already agonized. The month that had been her cradle came to also be her father's grave. One morning he did not wake up. St Magnus had dressed for him of wedding and birth, and decorated at the end of mourning for the transit to his last trip. Mistress Oakes was really crying her first mournful current but her mind was sailing to her new fertile river. Her mother was not her mother, but still she recognized her. Kirkwall was harbour, but now only Hazington, which she always called City, was a solid pier and this and its streets, already the lifelong home she wanted to inhabit.

   But the long time of the street would not be exempt from new romantic surprises. An afternoon of fog she read the hand of a gentleman, and she said this enigmatic sentence without knowing she was also reading her fate:

− "When you're about to get what you crave the most, watch out for a day of winds. In it you will get what you don’t expect. But you will always find a way out."

   That gentleman was an unemployed person from a good family, such good family that he had never had to work. He was one of the Bellamy, who along with the Rage, the Wrathfall or the first Rivers had given lineage to the illustrious of the city. Aaron Bellamy the aristocrat was called. He did not much pay attention to the prediction but to the beauty of the palmistry woman. He invited her to dinner and Mistress Oakes agreed. One of her best characteristics was to be a good listener. She did tell him, with the fish and the best wine, the most important facts in her life. Aaron was captivated by her. He wanted to see her more often. He learned of her schedule, quite free, and they saw each other many times.

   It was about two months later when he suggested her to enter his home. By then, he lived alone in a beautiful manor house from Fairfields. She accepted; winter had come that year rigorously to the city, and really hard to the roofless banks of the river. They were not sleeping together; in those years it would have been unthinkable. Mistress Oakes had her own room. And she soon found a job as a maid in some prosperous adjacent home. He reproached her that she had no need, but she didn't want to be her boyfriend’s parasite, because they were already a couple. It wasn't love. Of that illness she had only sickened once. Or at least... because she never doubted how much she cared for him, every day a little more, until she became doubtful whether she really loved him.

   This situation lasted more than two years, until Aaron, deeply in love, proposed marriage. She did not answer yes immediately, but she wasn’t able to tell him no. It was not the security that he gave her to always have a home. It was the happiness of imagined life at his side. Aaron had all the requirements to be the man of her life, but love, that bastard, does not think of those things. And she knew well that Joe was in her heart forever, well in the most incarnate rivers of her blood.

   The days passed and the wedding date approached. It was so close that she felt more insecure hourly. One afternoon she was wandering along the slums of the east, meditating seriously what to do. Aaron would be very happy with her, but he never could feel her love, because she knew that she would never be able to give it. And there was something else that worried her: her freedom. She preferred always to flutter to the dim light of a candle than lying next to the fire in a home where she would not be her. She walked back to Fairfields in the confusion of a difficult decision already made, and she didn’t realize that it was an afternoon of rude and harsh winds.

   She did not love him. She couldn't do that to a gentleman like Aaron. Alone with him she told him all her truth, knowing herself evil but not wanting to be a whore with him. He did not take it well. He could never go beyond the idea that she had dumped him. They did not see each other again. And that night she returned to sleep in the shadow of the Earth. There she spent several years in the cruelty of cold and misery, free and alone, among the detritus that the clean body of society got rid of without mercy, surviving to not finding warmth in any nearby chest. My dear, old, beloved, Mistress Oakes! How I love her. It is impossible to express to you how much.


 

   Protch realized that he did not know the man who was sitting in his room that morning. But he sensed that it was going to be vital to know him. He knew that he was a beggar, because he doubted not of his word. But one thing is believing and well another thing starting to assimilate it. And meanwhile he was only able to see the last of the Siddeley talking with heat of a beggar woman, the same heat that would be used for all. He needed his friendship and was meanwhile preparing the warm sheets of respect, the only thing that he could give him, because if it was up to him, friendship would be born and would grow. A respect and friendship naked of properties and fortunes, heated in the fire of the unique feelings that matter, the need to know who you are as you look at yourself in the mirror of a friend.


 

   And little more can I tell you of the long years she spent alone, first of all, first light from a lighthouse that never faded. Weak is the clarity of she who has nothing. But if she ever had shadows, and if I knew them, I will never tell you. Never humiliated, always courageous, she will not lose her strength as she has breath and her children can take care of her. She is very old, Protch, but we still have the fortune of seeing her every morning. And if I'm crying, you will know that few people deserve our tears, born from the emotion of everyone who wants to flood gratefully, fertile water going from river to river, rocked by the unsafe currents of the air channel.


 

   Once upon a time there was a woman of high stained-glass windows, who was not always respected by winds. Her light swings from chiaroscuro to a thousand stained glass of color where the clarity of the day penetrates and breaks down in golden sparkles, or sometimes muffled, because her life, between the shadow and the luminescence has been waning or waxing moon that hasn’t been allowed to fill and radiate the light spectrum that her smile ventured sometimes. But those who live with her know that even fading her light her fire is never put out, and sparks she has always had to light our most elongated shadows, scaring away our cold and bad omens.

  Five generations of Gerald Rivers there had been dealing carefully with the money of unwary or experienced people of the HSB, veteran savings bank in the prosperous west sidewalk of Avalon Road. There the fifth Gerald, between invoices, revenue, loans, fees and changes projected his life as if it were a transaction. I can't tell you whether he is cold or intriguing, avid or mechanical; he discarded in his path everything that does not fit in a notebook full of many-digit numbers. And with nearly thirty years he had not matched yet.

   But an afternoon of horseback riding amusement he met Linda Hamilton, young and experienced, who however was in a dangerous drift at runaway gallop. He helped stop the reins and avoided that she fell from the horse. Speaking with her, looking at her in the eye, now he could not know where the horizon of the day ended and where began her eyes. He was engaged in her celestial eyes like a swallow in a wire. But the best life project is sometimes reached by an accident: he fell suddenly in love, without any warning signal. That contingency was not in his business, but when he knew who she was he calmed down. The Hamilton family lived, idle most of the time, of large inherited estates. He wouldn’t lose anything for knowing her. Because she seemed to have felt something similar for him. They saw each other frequently and were married a year later. It was love, Protch, always they loved, but it is true that without certain monetary securities they wouldn’t have seen each other again.

   Linda Rivers was a forceful, grandiose, dominant woman and a flint where it was very easy for sparks to leap, rather a spirit of the air than of fire, many times a flame for her husband, seldom a burning light for their children, because they had three. Coupled with their inheritances they agreed to transmit them to other Rivers that could hand on the torch of the lineage. A year later they had Gerald, another Gerald, who for many years was called Second, though it could well have been Sixth, sometimes Junior although the boy always hated that name. He had the coldness of his parents mixed with an adventurous spirit not without opposition. Since he was a child it was obvious that he would not be willing to be the sixth Rivers in the HSB or to deal with the lands of the Hamilton, a rebel horse that wouldn't be easy to put in stables. He had his own way of understanding life, not always honest, always at his discretion, but with money from his parents... 


 

   Again I noticed that he wanted to say something.

−Protch, please, stop me whenever you want.

−I think it isn’t very correct to only interrupt you for something you imagine, that I will only know better when you tell me.

− What troubles you?

−His name. You've already talked about two Gerald Rivers. Of course it could be another, but I swear I heard that name for the first time on the lips of my cousin Rich. And not for the better. The first could have ruined the life of the second.

−Second, yes. Maybe that is his name. Don't lose hope. Perhaps I will tell you some little event that you don’t know.

 −I wait eagerly. Please continue with your story.


 

    And just three years after the birth of Gerald Rivers II small Olivia was born. And four years later her sister Kirsten. And then Linda’s parents left part of their land to their daughter and the husband of their daughter, as Gerald Rivers was always considered. The Rivers were perhaps the first to make the lowlands of Burnt Hills fashionable and build there, next to the arms of young Heatherling, in lands very appropriate for rides on horseback or on foot but somewhat infertile. All the wide area was soon filled with fine mansions for affluent idle or for those who preferred to live there after retiring the years of life they still had to live. It was the latest neighborhood, soon known as Downhills, of a city with new quarters every now and then. But the Hamilton were experienced hunters who gave name to the little house, as they liked to call it, immediately named Hunter’s Arrows. .

   Surrounded by horses and used to their presence and symbolism, it was logical for Olivia to believe that she was capable of handling all the bridles of her existence. She was from very young an idealistic dreamer who hoped to find a love that accompanied the treasure of her fantasies. Maybe a young gentleman with one sufficient income and his heart eternally in spring, and aging together bequeathing all the beauty of the world to their children. She imagined having at least three and even made plans based on their names. These changed often but remained the name of Lucy. There was something in its syllables that evoked an afternoon of summer light never reached by twilight. As Kirsten Rivers was growing up, Olivia used to talk to her sister, instilling in her the same dreams and hopes.

   Kirsten had a more social aura but at the same time was somewhat shyer. Olivia liked to adorn her with the word charisma. There is no challenge that she would not win despite her inscrutable appearance. She began very soon to be an experienced rider, which did not necessarily mean a benefit. Someone inexperienced or faltering does not feel safe and usually takes more into account the goddess prudence. He who knows he dominates some arts does not think if there is any dangerous pebble on the hill that you have to go down.

  But they both grew well and it was difficult to distinguish them, they were so alike. In addition to age, there was still the hair, Olivia’s was reddish and Kirsten’s was golden. They spent every hour together as children and as adolescents. And they always loved each other. Olivia said her sister had the beauty of an empress, and she returned the compliment saying that Olivia had the beauty, the light and the calm of a stained glass window.

  And they had to laugh remembering all this when their father requested a stained glass window which embellished the separation between the dining room and the living room. It was to Pennington workshops, famous glassmakers whose trading house was adjacent to the charming church of St Mary, Catholic temple of the city, where the Rivers didn’t go because they belonged to the dominant confession in the country.

    It was the penultimate stained glass of the Pennington, who soon had to transform their business into carpentry. To the taste of the Rivers and the Hamilton, they had asked for a hunting scene. There had to appear at least one swan, a coveted catch but impossible to find in Hazington. When Olivia saw it mounted, all her inexhaustible romanticism overflowed when looking at the exuberance of the scattered light in the broad landscape of the lake. The mastery of a few craftsmen who hardly could afford living their dexterity, still overflowed profusely in the works of the Pennington, and once finished, the piece was a polychromy of blue water and green reeds surrounding a stagnant flow where a living sun flushed which dazzled the third figure, the farthest. They were three swans in the same scene. From James Pennington’s explanations Olivia did not remember if she had heard that they were cygni melancoryphus or melanocoryphus, black-necked swans, but recalled that name until, many years later, knotting her past with her future, she discovered another Cygnus, more solemn and extensive, flying through the Milky Way towards the Eagle, probably Zeus this way changed to seduce Leda. In the foreground a swan was going to be shot, wounded of love for a female swan that, as usual, preferred to enjoy herself looking to a third party in the distance ignorant of what was happening. While love does not defeat you, lift your flight, you dejected swan, and open your feathers by the capricious wind waves and break the cautious air, lest love hinders you to see the horrible weapon pointing you in the rear. A bloody hunter prepared the shot with which it would be killed and its tears of love would not prevent him to end up in vain trophy. Olivia spent years deducting erroneous teachings of this small scene, and looking at the light, the color, the soul of the glass, filling with it.

   When my fellow mate one day finally dared to tell me quietly about her father, it was curious the few memories she had, because in her path he had hardly left any traces. Gerald Rivers could no longer find any ambitions that could fill his barren road and talked with his daughters with love but there was no more fertilizer than hunting or money in his dialogues and with those flowers it is not surprising that he had also spread his scraps of meal to make them continue the hunt for the money. Otherwise his path was clear, clean and tidy. He lived in the affirmative, and I know very well, Protch, this easy path does not imply challenges, and without them the soul withers, weakening the body.

   Meanwhile to Linda Rivers’ path came with force a few uninvited passengers who left traces of their dirty shoes. It doesn't matter if she met them at church or in a mundane meeting, but soon the infected trees of religious intransigence were ambushed on her dark avenue. At the end everything was rather than faith putrid water that could only get covered in mud in her children’s rebel roads.

   Of these muddy ponds of the mire of the ambition and intransigence of her parents, Kirsten Rivers barely managed to get out pristine. If her way was meant to be brusque and brief, at least in the burning light of her torn horizon agitated butterflies of the most important of life approached. She dared, as Hercules to Hera, to steal the golden apples from the garden of the Hesperides, and knew everything: love also. Her parents used to liven up dinners with bankers, or mere shareholders; on some occasions, to round up a number, also dark office workers and important promises of future fruits. It was just then when Kirsten met Fred, young and rather inexperienced, polite and romantic, who stole her heart. We do not know if Cupid hit also the beardless youth. Only knew about that love her sister Olivia, as her brother did not spend much time with them. He wasn't willing to be, he said, sentimental. But the two young women spent hours doing projects, livening up the long afternoons with nothing to do of their teens. They did not know if they had succeeded in concealing it from their parents, who would not welcome him, he being someone of no resources. The truth is that Fred loved to chat with her, so much that he made the usual mistake to do so in the vicinity of Hunter’s Arrows regularly. Surely the parents knew well the idyll, but the only certainty is that one day Fred was fired and Kirsten did not know of him. Olivia helped her to look for him in his address of Fortune Street in Riverside, where he didn’t return; and later to forget him.

   Meanwhile, without many missteps, Junior had found without being at all aware his future avenue. He came out of a sudden, but longer lasting love relationship, with a girl named Maureen, when in those days some lawyer was solving wrong things in the HSB. And to dinner at Hunter’s Arrows he came with his son: Alfred Donovan he was called. He visited them many times and talked to Second, sitting beside him, about his upcoming college projects. He was going to follow the familiar path and study law. To the young Gerald it suggested another way to get quick money that would not affect him the economic ups and downs that concerned his father, and he was just grazed with the gleam of defending those who needed to be defended.

  To University he went, while the sorcerer who prepared the cauldron of all the familiar paths, mixed in his potion strange ingredients, which left the whitish and toxic fumes that were for Olivia her four horrors.

   First horror. Her parents sat her a day contiguous on the table to a young man of the same age, son of one of the great fortunes of the city. And unable to know the reason why she ended up seeing him everywhere. The boy was graceful and rather reserved, but Olivia, not knowing very well why, was worried. Surely, she thought, there would be facets of him that she would not like. A shy glance, eyes of continuous concern, claw-like hands, the torso alert, as a predator eyeing its prey. Anyway, it was a little pleasure to chat a little with him. But her parents went further and married her one day, which would be more correct than saying she got married. For two years she lost everything, even the surname and was Mrs. ... But she didn’t use the name again. And if I know it, I'll keep it. Her parents-in-law bought them a villa on the east bank of St Alban's Road. There the Kilmourne should have gone through, if it had not rebelled and turned, but she did not know its waters yet. The beggar river lurking, veiled and next as an emergency, forming a black sheet that nearly lined the doors of her apparent prosperity. Ash Cottage was the name of the new house, wrapped in the ash trees, which as escort, away from the River accompanied the end of the city to the south. But fate kept its cards hidden and delayed to distribute them, and played with the name, knowing well that the abode of the rest of her existence would be a cottage of ashes for Olivia.

   Her short married life was a sudden dream and a startled awakening. She soon discovered that her husband did not love her. He estimated her only as a good match, and was for him little more that a fertile woman. Only with that goal he entered her from time to time, not every day. And at first to get pregnant seemed so impossible that she believed herself sterile. And meanwhile he did not consider her; they didn't have much to talk about. Never did he beat her but his constant lack of respect was evidenced in his ongoing slights and contempt. His wife’s opinion simply did not matter. Her cheerful face languished between frequent visits of Kirsten and they were not more because she couldn’t stand her brother-in-law. From time to time there came to see Olivia her parents and her brother, not very often, because they said that she had already chosen her bed and they would not interfere in the thalamus. Her husband wanted to decorate the family prosperity with the most distinguished of the populace and it relieved her to isolate herself from him for a few hours and immerse herself in the hustle and bustle. But she sometimes had to accompany him to where he could cover his blood that spilled from all sides. Sometimes he was bleeding through the chest and he very often prevented her from approaching. Not many more signs were needed to know that her husband was hiding something.

  The first sign she might have had, having given it its right value, one day in late summer next to her birthday. She was coming out of the stable after feeding her horses, which she never rode. Riding would give her much time to meditate on the absences of her soul, just what she did not want to do. She was getting home already walking her tribulations through trails of thriving peonies, when a slight noise made her stop. A young man of about 20 years seemed to have been savoring the enjoyment of haunting her property awhile without the shirt that he had just put on. Approaching, he greeted her with mild arrogance. After withdrawing, Olivia tried to guess what hazards could make that his chest was also stained with blood, with so many bloody currents that he seemed a newly flagellated Savior.

   But she soon forgot this blood in a new blood. Her belly was not empty and in December she confirmed what seemed certainty in the preceding two months. Safely inside blossomed a shifting sky, a seed had flourished and matured uneasy in that sea. Her husband very well received that news of the transferring of his river to an heir who will prolong his seed. Olivia hoped it was a girl, because her husband wanted a son and would then reveal his side, if not entirely friendly, at least more serene. It seems impossible but in those days even they talked cordially.

   Fate, however, dislocated its joints with the tricks of a fakir. It was just waiting to spring to turn her life as in a spinning dervish dance. It happened one night in late March, a day that was supposed that she was not to be at home: she had signed up to an excursion to see the falls of Wrathfall. The pregnancy was going well, but that day she was attacked for the first time by her terrible north wind and with a slight headache, returned much earlier with desires to go to bed. Already at Ash Cottage, she advanced with decision to her room but when she opened the door she saw a completely unexpected scene waiting for her. There was a naked woman in her bed with a whip in her hand; her husband very close, also naked, with the chest wounded and apparent currents of red, almost purple. The enigma of blood could finally be explained. I.e. she could have explained it if she had not gone suddenly frozen. Since that time she had a new name for her husband, and from now on I will call him "the wolf". She had not seen any but to see her husband that way, at that moment, rather than the predator, the prey, with his disfigured face and on the verge of biting, teeth which for the first time she seemed to notice long as sharp fangs, the skin of a wolf that, maroon, abruptly changes fur, the ferocity of a carnivorous animal that attacks when its litter is attacked made her remember all that. She was as icy as the firewood consumed under frost. They were two minutes when she failed to react, in which her breath turned into blood and a few rebel tears blinded her. But "the wolf" was more rapid in his reaction. In a couple of seconds he caught the threatening whip and he seemed that he was going to let it loose on her cheeks, but it was a click that never penetrated into her flesh. It was only the sign for her to leave him alone and a fierce scorn came from his eyes, cold and heartless. Olivia finally went out of the room, her mind in darkness and a dumbfounded heart, adorned with fear. Only years later she was told that her husband was always hungry for dominant women and submissive men and wandered looking for them in all sheets. She could have had him had she known that she should seize a whip. But her behavior had never been meekness, but unrequited love which was becoming abhorrence, flavored with the taste of the tedium and the unwillingness, the eternal question that there was a bond that could unite them, a needle with which to thread a friendly conversation that they could share.

   She had to leave. But where? She began to walk lost among the ash trees. At that time overnight spring burst in smells of discovery, but what surrounded her was slippery in the emerging daily fog. Also the vision of her later years. Everything was a veil, ashes, haze. Nothing encouraged her to return to the interior. She went in only a second to find some money for a taxi. She found one in St Alban's Road. Sat in her seat, she saw that her mind was also becoming blank. She could only feel; notice that her eyes were water, the first of a March that for her would be a lagoon. She did not know that a shaman was changing that water into a reservoir, still navigable, in the destroying rain that flooded her with the second horror.

   The taxi stopped at the required address: Hunter’s Arrows. The night was not too cold, but her organdy dress barely covered her and the jacket she wore was not enough. She felt better in the heat of the entrance, the burning of dozens of bulbs, the dear faces. At that time they were all in the dining room having dinner. They saw her coming with an altered face, an upset look and a contorted expression. Only Kirsten rose and solicitously she sought her sister a seat and some good pillows. What happened? It was the immediate question of all. She did not know how to begin and barely managed to transmit them the cause of her horror as they finished dinner. Images in thinking only make sense when they solidify in words and it was difficult to find them when everything in her was a mosaic, a glass changing color as the whip was descending, which was scaring away her reason. But with difficulty they were able to understand her.

   She did not know what she had expected as a response. She had only been able to reach the certainty that she should move away forever from “the wolf”, that there, in Hunter’s Arrows, her family would tell her how she should continue, perhaps sheltered again in their faces, away forever from that predator. But she soon learned that these Rivers were continuously frozen. Not even spring could thaw them.

   Her mother was the first to speak, after months or years of merciless religious indoctrination, in which a woman had a single role to play.

− "Olivia, dear, do not forget that you have made some vows and you owe your husband fidelity. All men have some hidden circumstances that sooner or later they bring to light, but we have to respect them. Remember that you already know the worst and now you must be patient and have a time of meditation and adaptation. Your place is forever by his side. He may be looking for in others what you do not know how to give. Think about it, and stop to see where your mistake may have been."

   Your mistake. Her mother blamed her for what had happened. She began to see what her parents were. More when his father began to talk making the mistake of insisting that she had chosen him:

− "You should not leave the one you have chosen, but you must see the consequences. And remember, daughter, the house you have, the clothes you wear, the luxury that surrounds you and the people so pleasant that thanks to him you could have met."

   Her husband did not have many friends and they were not more than one or two that had pleased her, not considering them her own friends. But it was only natural that his father said that. All that did not have a measurable value in primulae[1] did not exist. For a second her mind went to the stained glass. The three swans either loved or were loved. But the glazier had forgotten even to sketch a fourth possibility: not to love him who does not love you. With what parameter could his father value the price of that commodity? He noted that at least her sister, timidly, rebelled.

− "But they don't love each other." −she dared to say.

− "In a couple you should take more into account respect than love. Remember that, Kirsten, when it is your turn." -said Linda.

   The first fury was thrown away bitterly with her tears flowing. She didn't know what she expected from her family, but less and less. She just listened to them. But she could hardly bear that the same fateful destiny was awaiting her sister, that they could already be cooking it. From that night she spent years trying to understand what family means. It should be something more than related people living together, more than nurture, educate, or dress. She began to consider seriously what she was going to do next. She looked distracted at the first swan, to be able to escape a while of knowing what decision she could take, what alternatives she had. You, at least, won't soon consider suffering. But you've known a time the love and life that comes with it. And believe it or not, you've had more family than me, because you've chosen. The female swan has been your family. This is not a lineage: a family is the ones you have chosen. And then she started. Her brother Gerald spoke then, in accordance with what she was thinking. She actually had a family: the child who matured in her womb, the child of “the wolf", she grimly thought. And hers also. Due to her blood it wouldn't be a wolf cub, but precisely for this reason, she should keep it away from him.

− "You have a child to think about –Junior then said−. Don't forget that it is also his blood. You cannot deprive him of his part in his education. And if it is a son, there are things that only his father can explain, and no one like him can give him a safe and comfortable life. You have to make peace with your husband."

   Make peace. But she did not know when war had begun. It had consisted of small battles not knowing when hostilities had started. And she was sure that with him there could be no armistice. And a fierce struggle there would be later when they tried to convey a few precepts. What would be of the "wolf child" if it was a girl? She could not... she was not going to return to him. Only that was clear. But what could she do?

− "Could I stay here tonight?" –She had to gain some time.

− "You already know that Hunter’s Arrows is also your home. And my son-in-law’s, whenever he so wants it –her father then said−. But it would not be sensible to not know of you tonight.  He could understand it as abandonment of home."

− "It is right that you come back with him and ask him forgiveness." –It was her mother’s opinion.

   She could not ask forgiveness to whom was notoriously guilty. It was not only the horror of that night. An affair would be excusable if only other things unite them before, or there were prospects of things in common in the future. But her family had been clear-cut. They had sold her to the "wolf" and she had not understood and was guilty. Wrath may have an irreversible face. Crazy heart and clouded thoughts, and then a thousand times it was already impossible to back out of decisions taken. As there was no true contrition, her repentance was not then quite genuine. But evil was done. She did not remember with what words, but wrath made her curse her whole family. She stood up and left.

   On the outside of Hunter’s Arrows she started to reflect, walking around, what she could truly do next. And her demoralization increased when she saw that she could not reach anywhere. She had only the ever stronger certainty that to Ash Cottage she was not going to return. On the verge of entering a genuine despair, her sister, who clearly had gone out to look for her found her then. She had lost almost everything, but she still had the child in her womb and her sister Kirsten. They were then very near the stables. There they found.

− "Olivia, dear, I was looking for you" – Kirsten said with authentic anguish.

− "I know, my life.  I was not able to master my words and in the end I said them with fury, but I am glad to see you to be able to tell you that the curse was not for you."

− “Don't worry about that now –and holding her with her arms, she asked−: what are you going to do now?"

- "I don't know, really. I was walking to try to have a clear mind. I had only come to the conclusion of what I won't do: listen to me, Kirsten, love. I cannot get into Hunter’s Arrows. I would have to ask forgiveness from I don't know what of our parents and our brother. And if I did, it would be only for one night: they would try to convince me to get back to the "wolf", and that I will not do. Also for the child I am expecting. Imagine that it is a girl. What hopes or future would she have with him? Tomorrow I will try to look for a job. I will not be ambitious: I will accept any job. But what troubles me is where I will spend this night."

− "Do you remember Maureen? Our brother’s former girl. I don't know how it was, but I heard Gerald tell that she needed a maid. I think she lives in Knightsbridge Street. Do you know where it is?"

− "I suppose it is in Templar Village. I have not gone much to the Village and I do not know the street, but tomorrow I'll go. Her name is Maureen Merton, right?"

− "I seem to recall that it is. But tonight what are you going to do? You could wait a while and then I will let you in somewhere without their knowing."

   Surely all apocalypse comes with the four horsemen. And she was on the verge of meeting the black horse, the messenger of hunger. But the tunic of he who sat upon it was just a dark silhouette and fate is always opaque. She then heard a moan of her mare Kayleigh and a new idea came to her with the voice of that whinny.

− “I don't want to sleep tonight on the street. Tomorrow maybe, when I know the city better. And I cannot sleep in the house squatting as a critter. Kirsten… I could sleep in the stables. But I would leave at 6 in the morning, or earlier, I do not want to get you into trouble."

   At the end, Kirsten became convinced that there was no alternative. She let her sister in the stables and was two minutes looking for a warm place and ended up finding her a window whereby to look outside, in the angle between Kayleigh and her horse Alexander. Olivia was ten minutes alone, awaiting the return of her sister who had promised to bring her some blankets. She returned with them and some food, and many wishes for conversation, but the eldest of the Rivers sisters just wanted to be alone and think. She did not believe that she would be able to sleep something. It was not the sharp horns of hunger or cold. It was the uprooting of pain, that pain which intoxicates and has not been drunk, naked as a winter that comes without the transition of a soft autumn; the pain of the distress of losing so many things without having foreseen it, pain of moon which has lost its Earth and seeks a new sky planet to orbit. When finally she was alone she knew that it was going to be almost impossible to sleep something. It wasn’t cold that deprived her of protection or the smell of the stables or sleeping among her horses, the tears that escaped her of so many bitter losses. It was naked bewilderment, the turning point of her life, her Verôme. She wandered through the sleepless night considering possibilities but what was not her goal was increasingly clear. She was not going to come back with "the wolf". But to look at the possibilities she had terrified her. And not seeing more than a way out, she decided to finally go through the only permitted. Her only anxiety was her child; for herself she would have accepted going to the street or killing herself. For her creature she could degrade and apologize to whom she ought to, but even so her child, especially if it was a girl, wasn't going to grow up with horizons, she would be given the same emptiness that she had been bequeathed.

   She had hardly been able to sleep something when, at 6, there was Kirsten, as promised. She brought her coffee already prepared, still fuming but warm or almost cold because of freezing dawn in the transit between the house and the stables. And something to eat accompanied it. Looking at her sister in the eye she knew due to her marked dark circles and deep orbits that she had not been able to sleep much that night.

− "Have you reached any conclusion of what you want or you can do, dear?" - The younger sister asked.

− "I don't have anything clear and I am not able to get anywhere, Kirsten. I only know that I'll be looking for Maureen. And if I don’t succeed, I don't know what I will do."

− "Tonight I've been trying to remember... you see. Do you remember the last hunt Maureen came with us? I think that Gerald and Maureen broke a week later. I was really cold and although it was not going to be very useful she lent me this flowery scarf –and like a magician, she took it out of her arms−. Then I asked Junior her address to give it back but he would not tell me. Tonight I have started to look for it and did not have many problems to find it. It will be a good excuse to see her, if you want me to go with you."

− "I do not want to be a burden for you, Kirsten. But I start a new life, and I will be less frozen if you come with me."

   So the two sisters went finally away. They decided to go walking. Morning frost cut the skin like a knife when they crossed the bridge that separated Downhills of the rest of the city, above the highway. They didn't speak much. Kirsten realized that another more cruel frost spilled from the eyes of Olivia and didn't know how to avoid her the cold. Without being very sure of what she was doing, she gave her a jacket, but at that time her sister did not notice it; her impassive face betrayed the ice which her present and her future had become.

   It took them more than one hour to reach the Templar neighborhood. They asked about Knightsbridge Street and were told that they should reach Knights Bridge and turn right. They did not know if they had found it and were going to ask about the house of the Merton when they saw Maureen get out of number 15. They were not very sure of how they would be received when she made them a gesture of recognition and called them towards her. She quickly saw the pronounced dark circles on the two faces, but greeted them with affection and concern:

− "But they are my dear Olivia and Kirsten. How long without seeing you. What brings you around this neighborhood?”

− "We didn't know whether you would be glad to see us or the opposite” - then Kirsten said. Olivia, who was in an unexpected muteness, realized she should soon overcome her sudden shyness and say something.

− "We have heard −she dared to say then with an upset look− that you needed a maid."

− "Yes −for the expression of her former sister-in-law, Maureen realized there was a story behind, and suddenly added−. Look, actually today I will not start to work until 10. I was about to have breakfast. I usually do it in a bar very close here. What would you think if you join and if you have something to tell me, you do?"

   Trifolium was a small place near the Church of St Mary. They sat comfortably once they ordered. The cafeteria was nearly empty at that hour. In this placid loneliness that comes with the silence and smells of a cafeteria the three were willing to confidence. Maureen, to reassure them, because she saw them altered said that although her story with Gerald had ended badly, she had always loved her sisters-in-law. She almost smelled and perceived that Olivia had something to refer that would be painful. And she kindly addressed her:

− "But you want to tell me something, right, Livy? –in the short time she had been matched she had grown accustomed to call her sisters-in-law Kirsty and Livy−, come on, speak about it and you would have said the worst."

− "I need a job. But I have not been trained for any. But I could be a maid. At least I can cook. It is either that or sleeping on the street."

− "How you have reached this situation? –She dared to ask. She noticed Olivia tormented, but not ashamed. She had to increase her tone of affection. And of respect− well, if you think it right to tell me."

   Olivia began timidly, her heart broken, with tears that were beginning to water the fields of her own identity. She led her story to the end, sometimes sharply, sometimes turning her eyes toward the new hopes that after all she still had. Without wanting to be ruthless with Gerald, she did tell her that her family now only were her sister and the child she was expecting, neither her brother, nor her parents nor her husband. Soon she stopped her story a few seconds so that Maureen could express what she already suspected, and could talk about Olivia’s visible pregnancy. She finally told all that in a single day had happened and what her present situation was. Her story had been, among tears, intermittent, but finally arrived to the sea. She looked full of doubts, desperately, to Maureen. But she smiled at her:

− "Perhaps my mother is not going to understand, but these days she is out visiting her sister –she looked at her watch−. Yes, I still have time. If you really want to be a cook, Livy, the job is yours. Come upstairs. I'll be away a few hours, but Mrs. Carruthers will explain the most important things to you."

− "What is the salary, Maureen?" –Olivia took courage to ask.

   She mentioned a figure.

− "I would be ready to earn half if I had a place to sleep. And something to eat."− Shyness dies when truth is so important.

   While they went to the Merton’s house, they have agreed on this. Olivia was going to sleep there. Whether her mother said no or otherwise.

   Kirsten went away then, knowing that she left her sister in good hands, agreeing with her that she would come to visit, or if Mrs. Merton didn’t like the idea, to look for her and talk in a nearby square. Olivia finally knew the family Merton’s comfortable home. There lived now only Maureen and her widowed mother, Deirdre.

   Ralph Merton had been a colonel in World War II. A wrong howitzer had finished with his life. If his wife wept, she was quite good to hide it. She soon was relieved by the beautiful income for widows that she began to receive. In the same flat that the married couple had shared, now she lived alone with her daughter. And only a maid, Amy Carruthers, sullen and harsh, a woman who nevertheless was an efficient domestic, except in the kitchen because meals always left the stove lacking any basic ingredient, just what was needed to avoid that it was tasteless. This indomitable dragon was presented to Olivia that morning, and they had to speak so that she could be instructed. 

   While the dragon showed her part of her functions, Olivia dared to call her Amy sometimes. She didn’t like it.

− "Mrs. Carruthers, please."

   And thus the paradox was that the maid was called mistress and also Mrs. Deirdre Merton, but Miss Merton allowed her to say her right name and was always called Maureen.  She was going immediately to a High School, located in Campus Road, south of Avalon Road, west of Riverside Avenue, where the University campus was and many of the faculties. Maureen had been several years there teaching mathematics. And in the staff meeting she had met another teacher named Dylan Fiennes, with whom she was already engaged, as Olivia soon learned.

   She stood alone with the other servant, who was explaining Olivia’s functions. She had been hired as a cook, but it seemed that she would have to do everything. She learned of Mrs. Merton’s favorite foods, and the lady used to give her a weekly list of the dishes required. The lady rarely used to eat fish but often meat and had several steaks planned for dinner tomorrow, because she would not come back for lunch. So that day she got used to cleaning the house and preparing dinner for Miss Maureen, who after returning home began to talk kindly to Olivia. So she knew that in mid-May she intended to marry and be thereafter Mrs. Fiennes. If it was necessary, she would try to find her a job as a maid in her new house in Fairfields.

   Her room could be poor, but that night Olivia had a roof and that was all she needed. She began to get used to living without her husband and her family and to earning a living alone.

   The next day appeared the lady, fortunately at one hour of the evening that her daughter, who explained to her the situation, was already there. Mrs. Deirdre Merton was surly and arrogant, would never have with her woman to woman talks, as had her daughter and Olivia was just one more piece of her house. A valuable piece, as proven that night at dinner, but she never had more value for her than a useful tool that did her job well. Although she got used to attacking her with anything Olivia would make a mistake, never culinary.

   Anyway, Mrs. Merton got used to having her at home and Olivia had shelter and food. As she supposed her mistress did not allow Kirsten to visit her, so every day they met in the square of St Matthew’s Gospel, very close. There they spoke each evening from 6 to 7, her daily free time. In one of those conversations, the eldest of the sisters returned to the stained glass window swans.

− I am now better, sweetheart. But I can't help but feel like the first swan, on the verge of having a bullet stuck in the heart, without having ever known love."

− "Don't think about that now, dear. Think only of what you will soon have that the swan has never had: a child. And although I know that you hate, and with reason, that wolf of a husband, think that he has left you the only good thing that he could leave: his blood."

− "I fear that my son be like his father."

− "It also has your blood. And although I now know that you hate the Rivers’ blood, you are different, and you will care for your child with the greatest of love."

− "The Rivers’ blood is not entirely corrupted. You also have it. Oh – she sighed-, I'm looking forward to my child meeting his aunt Kirsten."

   Thus they spent hours, chatting and reassuring. Olivia was very scared, but her sister saw how she had removed part of the shadow, and encouraged her. And soon they began to talk about wedding, Maureen’s. It was scheduled for May 20. The latter used to converse with their dear Kirsty and Livy in the same square. Her future husband, she used to tell them, had just found a really good job in America, and soon they would move there. She still had to find an employment but did not believe that she would have any difficulties to find it.

− "Anyway, Livy, if you had difficulties with my mother, you can go to work for Miss McDawn, who lives very close, here in Damascus Road. She is now visiting her brother, in his country, but she will return in September. Then she will urgently need a good cook. The one she had got married and left."

   In the home of the Merton, Olivia spent April and May, with the contempt of the lady and the slights of Amy Carruthers. Still, she began a new life, and that was all that was enough for her. She learned to live among disdain, the house of the Merton’s and her family’s. Kirsten had informed her that the Rivers knew their daughter was working as a maid and she was an embarrassment for her husband, who had lost no time and already had a new lover, one such Mary.

   But finally it dawned on 20 May. The skeleton of the fog was lifting to discover a day of sunshine. Olivia attended the wedding, but could not later attend the banquet. She had to take care of the house on the orders of the lady. Maureen had not forgotten to invite Kirsten to the ceremony. The two sisters talked about the good looks that Mr. Fiennes, the groom, had, dressed up for the most important day of his life. And they did not have to wait too long to see the bride, in a beautiful white silk dress, the head clear and a luminous face. They were married by the Catholic rite, at St Mary's. Half an hour later Maureen was transformed in Mrs. Fiennes. An effusive kiss to congratulate the bride and Olivia returned to her tasks in Knightsbridge Street.

   The spinning dervish had to give even a pirouette for the life of Olivia Rivers that year and in his bare hands he was carrying the bitter bouquet of her third horror. Mrs. Merton would lose more without her, but she seemed to wait for her daughter to become Mrs. Fiennes to fire her. At the end of May Olivia was right on the street, with the salary of two months but no place to sleep.

   Maureen was already in another country and could not help her. Miss McDawn would not return until September. She went from house to house looking for a job, but knew well that nobody would hire her with eight months of already marked pregnancy.  It was unthinkable to return with her husband. She didn't want to ask for forgiveness, but in addition he already had a new woman in his bed. By Kirsten she knew that her family did not count her among its members and anyone who wanted to know was told they had two children: Gerald and Kirsten.

   She had already had time to get used to the idea that some night she should spend on the street, but even so the most furious breath of her absolute solitude began to blow with determination to become flesh. That night she could spend in on any pension. In Damascus Road there were several. But she didn't want to spend what little she had earned in two months with the Merton. That money was set aside for the moment her child was born. For him, or her, she went to the slums of the east, looking for a place to be protected. It was June, and it wouldn't be very cold anywhere else, but in the streets of Hazington it was noticed. She decided not to stay in the Umbra Terrae Boulevard, for shame Knightsbridge Street residents would see her. She knew a little further to the south was Blood Cattle Route. But there she did not seem to find a place of refuge from the wind, as well as the fear she had of the beggars who were there. Finally she spent her first night under Arcade Bridge, without even a blanket, but without anybody seeing her.

   Fate can be bent by an unexpected curve and however save you by a feather. If Olivia had not carried a child in her womb, another might have been her fate, but for him or her she would resist. And there, under Arcade Bridge, desperate and wrapped in a heartbreaking cold without blankets, she suddenly realized that someone had left a book forgotten, a love unpretentious small novel, apparently titled Forever Loved, where there was the impossible romance, but of happy ending, which had a woman called Madeleine. Just a hundred pages which nevertheless made her forget for a couple of hours the cruelty of the world. Olivia has always been an inveterate reader.

   It is very doubtful that she was able to sleep that night. Finally she stood up, tired of trying it. She didn't know what to do or where to go. But she realized that perhaps she should go closer to some temple. Between two choices, she knew that if she went to the Basilica, she would be there seen by the people from Downhills or her family; But if she approached the Catholic churches of Jerusalem Street she would be the talk of the people in the neighborhood where she had worked the last two months. But it had to be one of them, since with her marked pregnancy she was not strong enough to walk further. She finally decided to spend the morning in St Mary's Church.

  Lost and disoriented, there she was all morning with the only intuition that she should open her hand. Still, she was lucky. She didn't look at the other beggars who roamed there, but she could not fail to see an elderly couple who she met on the same day. She seemed the strong one. He walked by her side with lost stare. Olivia wondered a lot of things about them and if she did not feel completely defeated it is because she remembered the images of the small novel she had read the night before. She had left the book well hidden among some bushes next to Arcade Bridge, where she intended to spend that night also. She continued unsuccessfully looking for a job, but she knew that she would not get it until after the birth. To imagine having her child on the street was a living hell, but at least it would be born.

   At 6 she went to St Matthew’s Gospel to meet Kirsten, to whom she explained with difficulty how she had spent the past 24 hours. A strong impression it was for her sister to know that Olivia was in the street and that she had slept under a bridge.

− "What can we do, dear?"  –she asked with anguish.

− "There is not much that we can do, Kirsten, dear. The two options I had have been discarded. Our parents do not count me now among their children. And the wolf of my husband has another wife. Anyway I was not going to return with him. I will live somehow this time until birth. When my child is born, I will continue seeking employment."

− "But perhaps the stables..."

− 'No. I will not even approach Hunter’s Arrows or Downhills. Maybe you can find me a better place to protect from cold than under that bridge."

− "But what about the food?"

− "If only you could bring me something to eat without their knowing. But that you are not put in difficulties. We could meet every day at 6 here in this square. I'm coping well with it, but my child will need her mother is well nourished."

   And they spoke little more, because Kirsten didn’t find a way out of her own worries.  Her parents had matched her with Gerald Bergson, another Gerald, a shareholder of the HSB. They spoke of wedding for next spring. Knowing that, blood boiled in Olivia, but for any of the two sisters there seemed to be no more comforting thing than being with one another. No day either of them had good news to tell, but they loved each other and were together every evening. And Kirsten always came with some food for her sister.

   That night could have been similar to the former if it wasn't because Olivia, rather than resigning, began to accept what had happened to her. One day she would get out of the streets, but even under a bridge, she lived her life without the control of a family that had not proved to be so, without the shed blood of an angry wolf for husband. She began to re-read her small love novel, willing now to sleep, because she really needed sleep, when the couple she had seen that day at St Mary’s crossed the bridge. When the wife’s heart saw her there lying and so pregnant, it upturned and she said:

− "What are you doing here, beautiful? Don't you have a place to go? Let me introduce myself: I'm Helen Lauders. And this is my husband, Solomon."

− "Olivia Rivers –she said, but refusing to give her present name, with the surname of the wolf, who she did not want to see again. There was something in Mrs. Lauders which spoke to her of tenderness and kindness, and she needed it. So much so that she almost cried. The Lauders sat a while next to her.

   While Olivia was telling something of the events that had led her to this situation, she knew something about these beggars’ life. Mr. Solomon Lauders had been an eminence in chemistry, but now his decline was more than evident and his dementia was pronounced. But not having to memorize, his mind had been sliding down the slope of oblivion. He only remembered the noble gases and at times he was heard to murmur: helium, He; neon, Ne; argon, Ar; usually there he stopped, because he used not to remember that the following was the krypton. And if he said it he never reached its symbol, Kr. You could see his pain by not remembering them and the efforts which, nevertheless, he continued to make. His wife remembered them and recited the following two: “xenon, Xe and radon, Rn, Solomon." Then he nodded and she saw him mentally rest awhile, and even he asked his wife to remind him of the entire periodic table. She did so, because they used, after many years together, to have frequent conversations about chemistry and that’s how she ended up knowing great things on that subject. Her husband breathed when he heard Helen say the whole periodic table and did not feel badly, but she did, because she already knew well that her husband was not able to know what helium was or even oxygen, with what he had been.

   In addition, dementia had come too early, and with it the loss of job and money and you had to add that they had only had a son, evil enough, called Frankie, who had exhausted the family coffers and could not repay the money because now he was in prison for a felony that her mother did not want to specify. She blushed when talking about him, but it was clear whatever he had done, she still loved him. The Lauders had been three years in the street. She was chatting with Olivia and suggested bringing a couple of blankets. She returned a few minutes later with two and proposed staying that night accompanying her under the bridge. They used to sleep under some well hidden ash trees. They had no tents but that night she was accompanied.

   In the morning, Olivia told them where she intended to go that day, although she soon feared not to be able, in such advanced state of gestation. In Blood Cattle Route were many wandering beggars, but also some habitual. Next night she would know two others. There was a blonde woman of abundant hair, with enough mental strength as to assist with her resistance to more than 100. She had only been a few months on the street, also because of a problem with her husband. She was called Lavinia Garrison. She would be about 25 and she stared at another blonde man, called Willie Nubbs. This was an easy to decrypt enigma, and Olivia managed to figure it out when she saw that Lavinia spoke to him always looking at his eyes. Willie read her lips. It seemed that he had lived as a child with his father and this alcoholic inveterate used to mistreat him. From very small, they soon discovered that he had hearing problems. Something he heard, but it was better to let him read lips. But dumb he was not. In addition to knowing how to communicate by signs, his pronunciation of words was not very difficult to understand, once you got used to hearing them. He had been called mentally-handicapped, but people like Lavinia, who knew him well and loved him, knew that nothing happened to Willie’s common sense. And with less than fifteen years, he learned to make a living. He had formerly started to look for jobs at the harbour since he was able to do everything. Only in a couple of bad times he had been forced to sleep in the street.

   With these people Olivia learned to live her first days. From time to time, on Blood Cattle Route there were more beggars, people really poor who did not know where to drop off to spend the night, sick of body and mind, incurable alcoholic. But she was building her world with Helen and Solomon, Lavinia and Willie. With Mrs. Garrison she had some surprises. She was a former neighbour, one of the Garrison in Orchard Castle, and had spent her life dreaming of inheriting the family mansion, since she was the only daughter, and of becoming one day a gardener with a rich husband and very little to do.

   Her only fellow mate, she would know years later, but the beggars of the Blood, the most regular, moved in pairs: Helen with her husband; Lavinia, every day more in love, with Willie. She never was accompanied, but as she approached the birth and had increasingly less strength, she managed to reach an agreement with Helen Lauders. Olivia walked only a few hours to St Mary and then stayed with Solomon, taking care of him throughout the day while his wife got food for all three. She started to memorize the periodic table, which Helen had taught her. She had a good memory.

  July started with sticky fire during the day, frost by night, and a strong will that Olivia would continue on the street. At the beginning of the month she knew that she could not walk after a few days and that she should take care of Solomon, leaving Helen to think about her part. An afternoon she was going towards St Mary and she met Amy Carruthers, who almost shouted to her. She was telling her that there was a letter to her from Miss Maureen and that she should go in to pick it up. She didn't enter. She did not want to find Deirdre Merton there. And she read it on the street.

   "Dearest Olivia. I hope that everything is ok with my mother (she did not know that she had been fired. She thought that she was still working in Knightsbridge Street and by Olivia she shouldn’t know.) My life in Boston has only just begun (she gave many details about Boston and the hardness of the climate. She had found a job as a teacher and will begin to work in mid-September. Rather than mathematics, she was now teaching history. She had to study something, but the main things she already knew.) But living close to Dylan makes everything easy. I know that you'll be as happy as we are together. (Olivia dropped a tear.)

   But what matters, dear Livy, is that if you find unbearable living with my mother, you can move to Miss Brenda McDawn’s house in Damascus Road, number 19. Before coming to Boston I got her address in her brothers’ country, and I have written to them explaining them your situation. Brenda will be back on September 5. She will pay... (And she mentioned a figure, double of what she earned with Deirdre Merton). She will give you shelter and food, and for what I know of her, good company. She is a good woman and very affectionate. Especially I have spoken well of you, and not only as a cook. She will not have problems to teach you what you lack to learn. And little more, dear Livy. Here I leave my address if you want to write. Hoping everything goes a little better. And also give my regards to my dear Kirsty. A kiss from Maureen Fiennes.”

   She read the letter two or three times. Dear Maureen. Even in the distance, still worried about my problems. "God bless you", she could not help but cry. So she could find another job in September, her beloved Mrs. Fiennes already had sought it. But then she would have already given birth and Miss McDawn would have two people in her house. She sighed. September was promising, but she still had to live the bitter July and August. She had wanted before to go to St Mary and to St Mary she went. There she was a couple of hours. The day had been fairly good, but she learned to eat little and leave something for her future child. At night a bit of conversation with Solomon and Helen, Lavinia and Willie, wrapped between blankets back under Arcade Bridge.

   It happened in mid-July. Only a couple of hours she already walked every day to St Mary. There she was one afternoon, almost startled with heat, when she saw a well-known face walking with security Jerusalem Street. It was her brother Gerald. If you didn't know that he had never been romantic, you would not have thought it, but perhaps he was around the neighborhood in search of a woman. Whatever it was, there he was. It was evident that he had seen her and that he walked to the Church to talk to her:

− "What a shame, Olivia! To see a Rivers here!"

− "It does not seem that you have left me more alternatives, Gerald. But at least the child will be born. If you are earnestly interested in my life, I'll tell you that in September I could find another job."

− "I walked by here hovering around Miss Johnson, do you know her?"

− 'No. I don't have that luck. Let's see, Gerald, what alternatives do I have? Answer me if you want. Could I go back with my husband or my parents? I do not want to be on the street, but I don’t have a different chance."

− "Yes, if you accept your son is raised by your husband."

− "Being in the street has the advantage that I can say whatever I want. I did not choose my husband. You chose him for me. I will not return with him and from what I see, I will not return with my parents. Instead you are allowed, since you are a man, to choose, and are looking for a woman to your liking."

− "You are stubborn, Olivia. Men and women have not been educated for the same. You're still in time to apologize to your husband and come back with him. Our parents would only admit you back in Hunter’s Arrows if you return to him."

− "And now that I know, Gerald, leave me alone."

− "It won't be the same with Kirsten. She will soon be Mrs. Bergson."

   His brother was not going. Wrath has an unrecoverable face. By then, she was already able to bear that she had been sold, but not her sister, who she knew she did not love her future husband. For her, she got soured a bit more, and her angry answer was already a curse.

− "I curse you, Gerald. You will never have a good woman at your side or good kids, if you have them. Damn your Rivers blood. Depart from me forever and do not now put your hands on Kirsten. That at least you will not intervene. Leave us in peace forever. I am no longer a Rivers. I don't want to see you again. You are forever cursed."

  The words were educated, but still, they hurt him strongly. He went away then, but she would soon see him again, when July was changing into August. Anyway, the brothers would be for years separated, without talking.

   A few days later she saw her sister again, to whom she referred timidly what had just happened.

− "I didn't want to, Kirsten, dear. I didn't want to curse him. On your behalf. But I fear that it is already inevitable. Whatever happens, I will learn to make a living alone, without the wolf of my husband and my family."

− "You’re getting it, Olivia. Your life is so hard I don't know if I could bear it. I love Gerald a bit. I will learn to live with him before and after being Mrs. Bergson. But you have nothing to blame."

− "What is your future husband like?"

− “He is a simple man. It is true that I still do not love him, but I could learn to love him. And I will. Everything is a matter of time. You know that in our house you could find accommodation one day. But let’s change the subject. Have you thought names for your unborn child?"

− "For a girl I have. Time ago I thought that I would call her Lucy. But if it is a boy, I have not thought. You tell me, but not related to our family. Or to his father. Although now I know a beggar that shares his name."

− "Something strong and masculine. And if you do not want it to be related to our family, I don't know, I like James or Malcolm."

− "You choose."

− "Malcolm I like more."

− "So in a few days we will have here Malcolm Rivers or Lucy Rivers. You know? I have no idea how. But my son, or my daughter, is not to take the surname of its father. Cursed be forever."

− "You really hate him, isn't it?"

− "More than ours. I don't like to think about it, but I'm a Rivers. And one of the two must be."

  She had no more desires to argue with her sister, and that day the conversation finished there. July nights were already at least warm and Olivia was seeing every day how Lavinia’s feelings were turning into love. She wouldn't mind being soon Mrs. Nubbs. And you see that soon she was, as soon as she was able to take courage to make a declaration of eternal love to Willie.

   The birth was scheduled for August 10 but it could be before. But one night in late July, she awoke suddenly stirred. They seemed contractions, but it was very soon. Still, it was July. But some time later, she was aware that it was serious, that an unstable universe expanded in her womb wanting to look out in the light of the new dawn. That night she slept alone. She agreed with Helen that the latter would look for food for the three until birth, while Olivia looked after Solomon Lauders. At about 1 in the morning she no longer had any doubts. Her son, or her daughter, was coming already. She had decided that it should be born in the hospital. There was no Philip Rage, at that time there was something similar in the same place, the Jacob Chamberlain. It was a good place for the child to be born, but would it come that night? Desperate she stood up, without saying anything to anyone. I would go to the hospital by the slums of the east. What she had earned at the Merton’s she could give to her child.

  After Arcade Bridge she soon crossed to the Umbra Terrae Boulevard. If any beggar inhabiting there saw her, she never knew, but there was Madeleine, the fellow mate of her life, present that night even though she didn't know it. She must be wondering where a pregnant woman beggar would go. But neither of them knew each other then. She stopped at times to rest in some of the southern benches. There she stayed for about an hour waiting for her faintness to stop. She could then walk through Knightsbridge Street to the hospital. But a false alarm made her think that it would not come soon, and at that time it would be better, she thought well or poorly, to walk up Knights Hill. There she went climbing the hill as best she could. She already saw two or three elms that separated it from Umbra Terrae.

   Knights Hill was then a distant place in the hustle and bustle, a no man's land where you could see Arcade and the place where the Merton’s should be. But there was not a soul. In one of the flats opposite, although she did not know it, a woman should be meeting the same pains. But she stopped a second under one of the elms. She could not walk. She was worn out. Her progress was right. In the morning, or earlier, she would arrive to the hospital. But she thought that a break would do her good. And then it happened. It was 7 in the morning. She had remembered to bring scissors to cut the umbilical cord. And the child was in a hurry. The top of Knights Hill was not the place that she would have chosen for her child to be born, but it is true that long it was since Olivia did not choose her life. The pain was essential in those fateful moments. She had never found herself so alone and abandoned in the middle of nowhere, with no well-known face surrounding her with tenderness. It could not be: her child was there already, she was sure. She didn't know if she could have it alone. She imagined later referring it to Kirsten while she was breathing properly so it was well born. Already there was no time to walk the short route to the hospital. She could not change elm. The child was born with strength, days before planned, defiant and proud. It was a girl. Lucy had come. It was never for her a fourth horror, despite having her daughter on the street. She easily managed to cut the umbilical cord and there she dropped the placenta. With some reluctance, she dared to pick up her daughter in her arms and that's when it happened. He let her fall, Protch. She picked her up right away. Nothing had happened to the girl. Girl she was also, like the universe, so bright and fruitful. She had to find another way of living. For Lucy. She could not grow up with her father, of that she was sure. But perhaps the Rivers... At least Kirsten.

  A couple of hours there she was at the top of the hill and hardly knew what to do. But at the end she gradually returned home. She had already given birth, and in the hospital they had solved her nothing because she was never there. It was not Malcolm, this would not come. He never came. It was Lucy. She did not resemble her father, after all. She had the same black eyes of the Rivers, and one day perhaps she would have their same reddish hair. The impatient maiden of the last sunrises in July had already arrived. Now move, if you can, in freedom, daughter, break the air, cut the wind, your mother will teach you to walk and will take you on the wings of her best smile. She had already given birth and it was a girl. Lucy took her flying towards her home, where the Lauders and the fourth horror awaited her.

   Helen Lauders put in her hands a rattle in the shape of a green frog that had belonged to her, telling the mother that she had been very fond of it in her childhood. That first day they didn’t eat too much, but she had had enough. At 6 she went back to St Matthew’s Gospel to reunite with her sister, Lucy in the arms, so that she knew her niece. She was a couple of hours there but she couldn’t find her. She could not imagine what reasons would have made that Kirsten was not there that day. In the evening a couple of hours with them beggars, Lucy in her arms, watching the universe.

  The next day was, the morning very similar, much like any other day until the afternoon. A couple of hours she dared to go to St Matthews' Gospel to wait for her sister, but she did not go. There she met the remorseful look of her brother. Suddenly, despite all, Gerald talked to her again:

− "Olivia, sweetheart, I know that surely you don’t want to see me, but I have to tell you something that has happened."

− "What do you have to tell me? Is it Kirsten? Yesterday and today I have not seen her."

− "Yes, it's Kirsten. Listen to me, honey. If you don't want to talk to me, please start tomorrow. But I have to tell you something about her. Listen to me at least today."

− "Quick, what has happened to my sister?"

   Gerald wore black sunglasses. Something was happening undoubtedly.

− "She suffered a serious riding accident yesterday morning. Or that we believe. The horse is well, but she was under some bushes. You can see that the fall was painful. She was with all her chest bleeding, and could hardly explain what had happened. This morning the doctor has come. Her mind, already sick, had only words of affection for you. What will become of my dear Olivia, she repeated over and over again. But she was slowly going away. When the doctor got out she already was dead. We made him return, just to confirm what we already thought. Kirsten has gone, Olivia –and almost pale he said−, but up to the last hour she was always worried about you."

  It is impossible to describe what her sister felt when she knew the news. She began to cry there, in St Matthew’s Gospel. She felt lost. She had some courage to ask her brother where she was. As she supposed they had led her to the Pantheon of the Rivers, in the North Cemetery. There she went on occasion to bring her flowers. Olivia always loved her sister. But she could never assume that life was so hard with her and that she would see her no more.

− "Thank you for telling me, Gerald. Now I have to think what I can do the rest of my life without her, but I should know it. Go away, please, and let me think what I will do."

   Gerald walked finally away, but not before indicating her that today her parents would let her go to Hunter’s Arrows. Her husband knew the news, but God knows how he reacted. She didn't want to go anyway. She already had no more family than her daughter, and with her she returned, her eyes like waterfalls, to Arcade Bridge. When finally Helen Lauders came, she told her what had happened. She would have collapsed had it not been for her. She had no family.

   Her sister, she thought, would never be Mrs. Bergson. You would not like your life, Kirsten, next to a man who does not love you. You can’t help me anymore. You have not known your niece. Had I known, she would have received the name of Kirsten. Her entire life was spent in forward wanting to see Kirsten Rivers. "But I have to live alone, honey, already without you. As for me, I have nothing but my daughter, the child of my hopes. With her the Rivers will be less frosted, because Rivers we will continue to be. In her and for her the future awaits us. Perhaps her seed is fruitful. Perhaps within a month, I shall find refuge with Miss McDawn. Until September, I'll be on the street. Then, sweetheart, I do not know what will become of me. Understand me, dear, I must live, Lucy awaits me. With her the future will be less solitary than all my horrors. Who knows what awaits me. I'll occasionally see your grave, to bring you flowers and tell you what's new, I promise you, and meanwhile I will try to continue without you, forever without you. My daughter, who is your niece, will be our continuity, even though you've not known her and you will languish in your earthen blanket. Rest in peace.


 

   "Once upon a time there was a beggar who was born in an earthen cradle, because there is no wiser cradle." On earth she arose as a solid root, ripe fruit in the clay, clear fountain that is crawling from the spring to the river. In a remote and elusive dawn, together with the clarity that of gold dressed the grove, in a stripped and dusty hill, of a startled fall as the slow dying of that beggar July. Her weeping just was the prelude of life a while and then a monotonous click in line with the cold. Dawn of a frosty summer that only covered with cold her throbbing body, but her deep matter emerged from the burning clay where she had sprouted, has always also retained the fire of the aurora that gave colour to the star that lights us. Protch, I'm talking to you, as you've already guessed, about Lucy Rivers, my mate. And I cannot help that in many passages is also the second part of the story of her mother, Olivia Rivers, and how they came to be my fellow mates.

   So small, she was never aware that she had been born in the street, or the pain of her mother, who did not know how to give her a future. But Olivia could only think that her daughter was alive and was born well after all, and that she should feed her, in the streets or indoor. That she would be better, in all circumstances, without the "wolf" of her father. Lucy always was beautiful and was always protected. But she was born with deadly cold and her mother was never able to take it away.

   They were a night of August surrounded by the light of the stars, more in Blood Cattle Route than in Arcade Bridge, wrapped in blankets, for Helen Lauders had given them a few. For the two of them perhaps shone a planet with rings, near the stellar tapestry of the stars of summer. There it was around and with some hesitation, Saturn observed them. The yellow lights were not only deities; unanimous, they wanted to join in a warm breath.

   She was never aware that the first August of her life she was on the street, or of the fact that her mother was going every day to Damascus Road, 19 and always found it closed. Miss McDawn was not at home or in the country. August was an odyssey for her mother, but she never knew it. She was in the street and felt cold and her mother was frantic for not being able to take it away.

   But finally on 5 September she found the open windows of balconies, and decided to ring the bell. She did not trust in obtaining a job with a daughter recently born, but she tried it.

   Many of the Templar Village homes are one-story, but you have to climb stairs. When she rang came out a lady with a clean look and good-natured, with a luminous face and her hair in a bun, sometimes rebel, who gave her a nun and demure appearance not matching well with her free and simple character.

− What do you want?"

− "My name is Olivia Rivers. I believe that Mrs. Fiennes talked to you about me. I'm looking for work."

− "Maureen told me about your pregnancy. A woman worthy of a better mother - she didn't get along well with Mrs. Deirdre Merton-. But come in, please. I see that you have already given birth −her daughter was then dozing in her arms−, what is the name of the girl? She’s beautiful."

− "Lucy. I don't want to deceive you, Mrs. McDawn..."

− "Miss" - she broke off, looking at her with affection.

─ "Miss McDawn, look, I would be willing to get an almost miserable salary, but I have a daughter and no home where to sleep. Here my little Lucy will not disturb..."

─ "I'm very lonely, Mrs. Rivers. And if you and your daughter are coming to live here, it would be an immense pleasure for me having company. You seem to be a good woman. And in terms of the salary it will certainly be worth. My parents did not leave us much, but they did leave a good income to their three children. I haven’t got married. I would like to know you, Olivia. Maybe even we could be friends."

  She was shown the entire house and Olivia was learning what her tasks would be. She was going to have to do everything but mainly cooking. Miss McDawn acknowledged that her meals were often quite unexciting. Also she would have to do a little everything else, but the salary was splendid and basically she would stay there as a maid and as a friend of a Brenda McDawn that appeared to be a good woman and that was in need of friendship. She was shown several photographs on the sideboard. They showed the same man twice or two different men, she wasn't sure.

─ "They are my brothers. I am older and have two twin brothers. This on the left is Matthew and Mark on the right. They are journalists and they were sent as correspondents to Cádiz, to the civil war General Franco won. There they knew their wives. Matthew was married to Sagrario Íscar and Mark did the same with Consolación Tébar. But they finished each one on a side. Matthew was on the Republican side and chose to go into exile. In fact he returned to his country, and now lives with his wife in the capital. But they had a son in Cádiz. Here you can see him:  It is my nephew Miguel. He is already 15. He was born there and lived in his country until the end of the war. My brother Mark and Consolación remained in Cádiz, and had a daughter. This is my niece Brenda Dolores, which now is twelve years old. I know that I'm making you dizzy with so much family but there are pictures of them everywhere and soon you will remember all their names."

   And indeed she soon learned all the names. That night already she was going to spend there. She only had to cook dinner. For other things she would start the next day. And they sat down to eat together and Olivia was seeing Miss McDawn was a woman with much need to talk and seemed rather to have found a friend of the soul than a maid. Olivia also told her much of her story and Brenda, whom she called that way rather than mistress, understood her without pitying her. And she began to feel that she had found refuge, a safe harbor from which to start her life. That night she almost wept when she saw her new room. It was not luxurious, but again she was going to sleep in a bed and under roof, and her daughter spent the first three nights there sleeping with her mother until soon the lady would surprise her giving her a cradle. Olivia felt that while she was in Miss McDawn’s house she would have a safe life and meanwhile she would try to save to have one day her own home. She had her free day on Friday, although she hardly left the house. She was not going to the cinema or the theatre or spent the money earned there. First Friday she came out to see their former comrades in Blood Cattle Route and she knew mournful news. Solomon Lauders had died. His wife was shattered, but spoke calmly with Olivia.

─ "It is the best thing that could happen now. He wasn't himself long ago. If you don't have memories of your life, you’d better go now."

─ "What can I say, Helen? From what you've told me, he was an exceptional man and an eminent chemist. His life was worth. And for me it has been a pleasure getting to know him."

   They started then to talk about which was Olivia’s life now. Helen was glad for her and Olivia promised to come and see them, if not every day, at least every Friday. Lavinia and Willie were still with Helen accompanying her on the streets and it seemed almost certain the ship of love of those two would reach their harbour soon.

    Life with Brenda was easy and she never attacked her. She was rather a real friend. Never got angry at her for the few mistakes she could make and so Olivia saw her one day cleaning the living room lamp, which had not been entirely clean.

─ "Brenda – Olivia was horrified to see her clean and said to her - , I am your servant. Let me do these things and I will do them and if I do not do it well, say it and I will start again. "

─ "It is not important, dear. This lamp always was difficult and Mrs. Dragg – she was the former maid - wouldn’t leave it ever bright and then I reviewed it. You make meal ready, that now I will clean it."

   That was the usual if Olivia made a small mistake. More than maid and lady they were friends and they talked a while every day - they always ate together- about her nephew Miguel and her niece Brenda Dolores.

   As for Lucy, it is difficult to explain how and when she came to know that that was not her house, that her mother had no home. She called Miss Brenda mom Brenda and was very smart in learning to walk and talk. She soon had a good red hair and her mother liked her long hair to be tidied up. She was hardly naughty and the lady always gave her toys and candies and told her stories of beautiful princesses and merciful fairies. She was learning to live her life as it was, but still she did not meet the ice face of the slums and the bridges.

   A Friday of late January Olivia returned to Blood Cattle Route and there she heard two news, one of them sad and the other happy and hopeful. Lavinia cried when seeing Olivia approaching and spoke to her.

─ "My father couldn’t resist more time. For some months he has been taken care of for something in the lungs. He died yesterday. I have just come from his funeral. But there is something else that I have to tell. Brad Garrison has made Orchard Castle’s heiress to his only daughter. And some money accompanies it. So last night I took courage to do what I had long wanted to do. I have proposed marriage to Willie and he said yes. And Helen will come to live with us. My future husband is seeking a job as a gardener there on Sunny Slopes, your old neighbors, the Kensington’s house. With only one salary we may have enough. And if you are still looking for a job one day, you can come with us to Orchard Castle"

─ "Too close to Hunter’s Arrows, Lavinia. I don't want to live with my parents and my brother. But I really appreciate it"

   The wedding was finally on Sunday, March 4, in the Basilica. Olivia was nostalgic, recalling that the last wedding that was there, Mr. and Mrs. Fiennes’, she had gone with her sister and it had been discussed together. But she had to say to herself, "Come on, you fool, now just think of the happiness of your friends Lavinia and Willie". She calmed a little and came to the end of the ceremony. She did not attend the banquet but she congratulated Willie and her friend, now Lavinia Nubbs.

   But Fridays she devoted them mainly to stroll up to the North Cemetery, to bring flowers to her sister and talk with her a while.

   She had been a year there when a late summer afternoon the bell rang. When she opened the door, she found a face known by old photographs. She did not know which of the two brothers was, but then she looked at the right elbow of the gentleman who was in short sleeves. Brenda had taught her how the two brothers were distinguishable because one of them had a spot shaped as a strawberry almost at the elbow.

─ "Are you Mr. Matthew McDawn?"

─ "Yes, and you must be Olivia. My sister has written me speaking to me of you."

─ "Brenda is visiting a neighbor, but she will soon return. Take a seat. Do you want anything to drink?"

─ "A glass of sherry I would have."

    But still he had not tasted it when his sister returned.

─ "Hello, Matthew, love. How are your wife and your son? Haven’t they come with you?"

─ "I wanted to spend a week here with you. Sagrario is still in the Capital. And Miguel is with her. He did not want to come. For his age, he is a very mature guy. He is looking at old books of law. Perhaps he is a lawyer one day."

─ "I was visiting my neighbors the Miley. Their daughter-in-law, Rebecca, has just given birth. Charlie her son is called. He is very beautiful."

   If you see that I am too long in certain details and am wordy, Protch, stop me. But there are insignificant conversations like this between the two brothers that I want to tell you so that you remember for example the surname Miley, that perhaps ended being significant in my story.

    The three of them dined together each day of that week that Matthew spent with them. He was telling the same story that Brenda had already told her. How it was that he didn't speak with his twin Mark. The origin of all was their wives. Consolación, his sister-in-law, was a rich girl who couldn't stand Sagrario, his wife. One day they engaged in a childish dispute, but the acid tone of it was raising and they ended up talking about politics. The brothers intervened and it was for the worse. It was not their war, it was taking place in another country, but their wives were each on one side. They said things that they did not feel at all, each one identified with a creed and wanting to defend their wives, they would insult each other badly and then the two were too proud to ask forgiveness and now they didn’t talk. In the end the side of Mark won the war and Matthew with his wife and his son decided to return to this country,

─ "Therefore I tell you, Olivia - two days later they already spoke to her as if she was another sister and Olivia almost cried because of the affection shown by the McDawn family- do not ever argue with someone about politics. Arguing of religion can be harmful, but politics was worse."

   Matthew McDawn used to come a couple of times a year, but always without his wife and his son. Olivia soon understood that Brenda and Sagrario did not get on well. Her brother knew and didn't make comments but his visits were becoming customary. In one of them, Brenda was still insisting that her two brothers reconcile because nothing had happened between them that was not solvable, but Matthew always gave the same answer.

─ "I got on very well with him. But perhaps our relationship has ended forever. I am glad of his happiness with Consolación. Really, Brenda, I am happy that he is happy. But to tell you the truth I only regret now I am losing Brenda Dolores’ growth. Moreover, each has made a living and that’s all. The situation in their country is not good enough to go back to Cádiz, but always I will be in love with this city, its light and its winds"

   And that was usually all. Even though Brenda insisted, it was impossible to reconcile them. At each visit of Matthew McDawn he spoke only of his memories of Cádiz and that southern country, its people and its customs, and its current situation. Though already past the worst years of the famine, it was still a dictatorship and it was not feasible that he would walk beside the Atlantic in that city.

    Meanwhile life was passing comfortable and warm. Brenda was more than her mistress, her friend. With a rather delicate stomach, Olivia was careful of what she prepared. Small Lucy already was four years old and she hardly ever made any questions and almost one could say that she understood her mother's life. She was a very smart girl to understand certain things. Her mother answered her questions as best she could but she could not answer that they were at home. Olivia believed that, anyway, she would spend her life with Brenda McDawn and that one day she could have her own house. It would be the same to her that it was small and almost rickety but sufficiently warm so that the mother and daughter could share a warm home where Lucy didn’t have so much cold, which was customary in her. At least she didn’t live on the street and resisted with less pain in the refuge of the friendship with Miss Brenda.

   She had been there four years when a Thursday at three o'clock in the afternoon they rang the bell and Olivia opened the door and was surprised to find Lavinia Nubbs. She knew her address and Brenda would have not objected that she came to visit. Her face was, however, downcast and Olivia, not knowing why, began to feel frosted. After greeting her, Lavinia took courage and spoke to her.

─ "I come because I do not know if someone in your family will be in contact with you."

─ "They don’t even know where I live. What do you have to say, Lavinia?”

─ "It is not easy what I come to say. It's your father."

─ "What about my father?"

─ "He has died, Olivia - she began to cry but she was empty, feelings anesthetized-. This morning he went to work as every day. Apparently a truck in Avalon Road has knocked him down. It seems it has been instant. The funeral will be tomorrow. I had to tell you. "

─ "Leave me alone now, Lavinia. It is a long time since I am not one of them, but I have to cry. We are three."

   She told Brenda what had just happened and they spent hours talking and caressing tenderly. She gave her also one free week and although Olivia protested, it was useless.

─ "Tomorrow you must go to his funeral, dear. If you don't, you will regret it for life."

─ "Anyway tomorrow I was going to see my sister, like every Friday and I will go into the cemetery. I will go to the funeral."

    That night she could hardly sleep. Scarce were the memories that she kept of his father, but she remembered the times that he was proud of the garden and the few times she had slumbered on his knees, tired and shaken or the happiness that you could tell the day that finally the glassmakers Pennington had finished installing the stained glass window. With those insignificant memories and with Lucy at her side, already in a bed also given by Brenda, she managed to sleep at least a couple of hours.

   The next morning she got up early and then she was headed to the north, when in the church of St Mark she found the silhouette of her brother, who was waiting for her.

─ "Olivia, dear, I was looking for you. I knew you were employed by more or less here but do not know the name of your lady and it has cost me to know your address. It's dad."

─ "I know, Gerald. Yesterday Mrs. Nubbs told me. I guess you know her, for she is still your neighbor. I was going to the North Cemetery."

─ "We’ll walk together then."

─ "OK, but sorry, Gerald. If it is possible let’s not talk. Tell me only the details of the accident and how is mom."

    His brother told her all while they were heading to the north. Now she was by his side he wanted to tell her something more about his love relationships but her sister stopped him with some excruciating "do not talk to me". And Gerald had to get used to talking only about the details of the death of Gerald Rivers I. But when arriving at the cemetery, her sister thought it better and finally spoke to him.

─ "Gerald, give a kiss from me to mom and tell her that I am truly sorry. But I'm not going to enter. Tomorrow I will come to the family Pantheon, above all to see Kirsten. But I will cry and pray for Dad. But alone. I am not going to go to the funeral. I don't feel with strength for a family reunion of the Rivers that are. I could also find my husband there, who I guess will come and I do not want to see – It was confirmed by his brother-. I am sorry for what is happening with the Rivers, but I already have another life. And from now on, Gerald, though I guess I will always love you, because you're my brother, do not talk to me more."

   And Gerald had to leave things there. He knew that that day he had not only lost his father, but also, and finally, his other sister.

   The following day Olivia went to the cemetery and deposited a bouquet of roses in honor to Gerald Rivers I, who she would not see ever more. At the end all the money you've accumulated in life, has not been good for anything. But by your side, Dad, is my sister. And in order to see her I will come to see you every week. I will only remember the good times and in this Pantheon there will always be fresh flowers and my company.

   She was quieting with the passing of the days. Ever she had fewer people dear to her around. Only Brenda, Mr. and Mrs. Nubbs, who she didn’t visit because they lived in Downhills and of course her beloved daughter Lucy. All she had in life was to be hers. She grew beautiful and her mother saw that she was going to be a very pretty woman. At the moment she had to take care of her education. Olivia had saved for her early years and did not know if money would there be if her daughter one day would like to make higher studies. At the moment she was intelligent and clear, a reserved and pretty girl who did not make her mother any more embarrassing questions and Olivia could never find out what Lucy thought about her life.

   A day in September when she had already been there six years, Brenda surprised her with an announcement.

─ "I have been many years without seeing my niece or my brother Mark. I am leaving to Cádiz until December. I want to spend a few months with them in their country. But of course your daughter and you can stay here comfortably until my return, taking care of a house that already belongs to the three. It will only be three months, dear – she said seeing her cry-. Immediately we will meet again."

   And they kissed bitterly perhaps. Meanwhile Olivia expected December taking care of the house. But her real concern those days is that they had already been there six years and Lucy started school. She took her to a school near Jerusalem Street and was going to pick her up every day. At the school, Lucy began to know things of the world that she still didn’t know, as that other children had a home and she did not. She didn’t overwhelm her mother with questions, but she did some, and Olivia didn't know how to answer her. She was just able to say that after all they had a house in Mama Brenda’s home, as her daughter called it.

   Every day she surprised her mother with a drawing. She was like her sister Kirsten. Otherwise she was good at all subjects, but had some difficulty with the language, because she didn't understand it. Soon they made her see that two modal verbs could not go together. And she quietly wondered why. The life of her mother was an I must can, and she wasn't very sure, but it didn’t seem the same to say I must be able to. Over time this kind of incomprehensible things, although she didn’t understand them, she memorized them because they so explained it and that was all. She always passed her exams. She was an excellent student.

   But December had arrived, and Brenda was delayed. Olivia had the entire house very clean awaiting the return of her mistress and friend. The month passed and no news. She was already really uneasy when a week before Christmas the doorbell rang. It could not be Brenda. She had the key. But obviously she came to open. It was Matthew McDawn, or so she supposed, because this time he didn't have a bare arm and could not see the stain in the shape of strawberry.

─ "Hello, Mr. McDawn. Your sister has not yet returned. But come in."

-"I know. About that I came to talk to you."

─ "Has anything happened to your sister?" – She asked in anguish.

─ "No, calm down. She phoned me a few days ago to explain it. My sister is going to live in Cádiz, with my brother and his family. And it seems that it was not easy to convince her, for you and your daughter. Look, we are going to sell this house, but my sister does not want to leave you abandoned. My wife and I need a maid. She really convinced me. You can come to the Capital with us."

   Then Olivia was so stunned that she did not know what answer to give. Going to the Capital she did not like at all, but she would have to do it, for Lucy. But it was clear that there was no reply. So it was Matthew who spoke.

─ "It is not necessary to reply me now. Look, I'm going to be staying a week in Plymouth Hotel in Temple Road. We can meet next Friday and if you wish, you may come with us."

   She had to think and while Lucy was still at school she walked to Umbra Terrae Boulevard. But she had her mind on several points and decided to sit on a bench to meditate.

   What could she do? She didn’t feel much affection for that city, but there she had lived all her life and she did not want to move to the Capital. Of course, for Lucy she would have to do it and there she would not be jobless. But outside Hazington, her daughter would not know her roots. She didn't feel at that time too much affection for his brother, but she could meet him one day if things changed. And of the family of the "wolf", some of her father’s brothers behaved decently. She didn't want to deny to Lucy the possibility of knowing her cousins, for example. And she should also change school halfway through the school year and school life would be too hard for her daughter.

   Another possibility she had was moving to Orchard Castle with the former beggars, Mr. and Mrs. Nubbs. But they were already in charge of Helen Lauders and a maid would now be a burden for them. And anyway, she felt completely averse to Downhills, the neighborhood of her childhood. She also had the possibility to return with her husband or her mother, and dismissed the two soon. If she had no other option, she would go to the Capital, but not those. Of course, she had one week to find a job and stay there. And suddenly she thought: the Silke. They were Brenda’s neighbours and needed a maid. She hadn't thought of them before, because they never got along well with her mistress and friend. I could go and see them anyway. She would not lose anything by trying it. She was already standing up when a lady asked permission to sit beside her on the bench.

─ "My name is Madeleine Oakes."

─ "Olivia Rivers. You are Mistress Oakes, aren’t you, the seer of the future?"

─ "Right. So I earn sometimes a living. But I hope that you don’t mind, I am a beggar."

─ "I also was a few months in my life. Now I have been six years working as a maid."

─ "You have a child of about that age?"

─ "Yes, I have a little girl. Lucy is called. She is now at school. How did you know? Have you seen me with her?"

─ "Excuse me, but I never forget a face. And it happens that some time ago, a night of insomnia, I seemed to see a pregnant beggar climbing Knights Hill."

─ "Holy heaven. It was me, yes. My daughter was born there. A false alarm led me to want to relax there. It was probably foolish, but Lucy was born that night, in that hill."

─ "You could vent and tell me your story. But I don't want to seem like a nosy woman. The day has been good and I can spend an hour or more hearing you. It is that I feel that you are right now at a crossroads, and that maybe I could help you."

   That woman had a special magnetism that it was easy to come out with fluency all of her bitterness. It was almost the first time she saw her and of course it was the first time that she spoke to her, but she felt something very strange. She felt protected, as if she had found the grandmother or mother, friendly coming to your bed at night to tell you that everything has been a nightmare, that you may go back to sleep safe, that what you hear is only a storm, not ghosts, and that it will soon stop. She was an hour telling her all of her last years, her forced wedding, the day that she found her husband with another woman in bed and a whip in his hand, the reaction of her parents, her months with Maureen Merton, how she got to the street and the first beggars she knew, her sister’s death, and at the end the years with Brenda McDawn and her doubts at the moment.

─ "If I did not have a daughter, I could even be happy on the street, but my anguish is not knowing what to do for her."

─ "Olivia, you know that, to some extent, I see the future, and I know you're going to have a long and full life. I do not know where or how you will live, but believe me, you will not always know, but you'll be happy."

─ "I must find a job. If I find one this week, I will not have to leave the city and I could see you more often, Mistress Oakes. I want to talk to you again."

─ "I could wait for you tomorrow here in this same bench and we may talk again. But come in the afternoon. Here I will be waiting for you at five o'clock. And come with Lucy and I may know your daughter"

─ "So it will be, Mistress Oakes."

─ "You can call me Madeleine, if you prefer"

    Madeleine. Only Olivia and I call her by that name sometimes, but not always. For everyone and for me she is also Mistress Oakes, for the word Mistress seems to have been invented for her.

   That very afternoon, Olivia spoke with Mr. and Mrs. Silke. They were a comprehensive couple and she was immediately accepted, but there was a snag: they had three matched children who spent weekends at the home of their mates, but Monday to Thursday slept there. If she accepted the job, she would begin on January 1, but Olivia would have nowhere to sleep, and what is worse, his daughter either, except on weekends. She still slept in Miss McDawn’s House, and Olivia decided to tell some things to her daughter, how it was that she had a grandmother, an uncle and a father, but they didn't love her. It was easy to see where Olivia’s mind was: she wanted to stay with the Silke and Mistress Oakes. And she told her that now they had nowhere to sleep, that she should still think what to do.

   And the next day she was at five in the Umbra Terrae Boulevard with her daughter, and there Mistress Oakes was waiting for her, sitting on the same bench. She received her with her best smile and asked Lucy to come closer.

─ "Come here, beautiful. You're as gorgeous as your mother and I’m sure that you are a very intelligent girl."

─ "Thank you, what is your name?"

─ "Madeleine. But everyone knows me as Mistress Oakes. You can call me as you wish."

─ "Is she my grandmother, mom?"

-"Would you like her to be?"

─ "Very much"

─ "Thanks, Lucy - said Mistress Oakes-. I'd like to be your grandmother. But has your mother already told you anything of her story?"

─ "She has."

─ "Tell me, pretty, with hand on heart, where do you prefer to live?"

─ "Where my mother be happier."

─ "Do you like this park?"

─ "It is beautiful, yes. Here I can play pretty well; there are many trees, and plenty of water.

─ "This place is very safe, Olivia, and there are several bridges that cross the lake where we could sleep the three of us together. The mind of your daughter is opaque, but I have read that she will have a long life and will be happy, and I thought I guess that one day she will have a quite original family. So you follow your heart, Olivia. Did you decide something?"

─ "Last night I found a job. But my daughter could only sleep there on weekends. I think that I should go to the Capital."

─ "What does your heart tell you?" - asked Mistress Oakes.

─ "If only it were me, I would feel very much at home here. The months I spent in the street were not so terrible and I survived, in some moments, even with a certain happiness and serenity. But I must give a home to my daughter."

─ "Olivia, I have a home. And I do not claim it. If you stay with me, I will go a month to Kirkwall in the Orkneys to put it to Lucy Rivers’ name. I assure you that I don't want it. And I also inherited some money. It would be for her education."

─ "But I cannot accept, Mistress Oakes..."

─ "It would not be for you, Olivia. You and I would earn our lives through charity. But your daughter would already have a home. I would do so for Lucy. Believe me. I don't want the inheritance of my parents to be for the State. And I don't want it. Let me finally think what to do with all that."

   Olivia’s mind was a funeral poem at that time. It was either going to the Capital or staying with her daughter in the street. But she sensed that beside Mistress Oakes she would always find calm and shelter. Her daughter would live there for the time being until she found another job. Meanwhile, she felt that she had just found the mother she never had. She never knew if she had decided the best for Lucy, but in just two days her daughter and Mistress Oakes were playing together as grandmother and granddaughter and she saw her daughter smile with security. The dreaded day arrived to meet Matthew McDawn and to explain to him that she would now work with the Silke. He reminded her that she always could go with them to the Capital if things were going badly and told her his address again. That day Olivia was already left homeless. They found a sheltered bridge where to spend the first night of Lucy in the street with little cold. For Lucy Umbra Terrae Boulevard was a dream for her games after school. And at night she slept in the good company of her mother and her grandmother.  She always called her by that name. And Mistress Oakes, leaving Madeleine for Olivia, who used it rarely. But it was clear that they looked like a family of three generations that every day loved one another more. Lucy did not complain about anything and smiled every day to her mother, noticing a bitterness in her that would never leave her. But her mother spent many years working, the Silke, the Brooke, the Vandermeer, Miss Ackroyd.

   Arriving January Olivia began working with the Silke. They were a good family, parents already very old but they rarely complained and were very bearable. On the street, the days that her daughter could not sleep there, in early January, she met a new beggar, close friend of Mistress Oakes, called Shannon Dee. She had lost her mind and not even she knew what disease she had. She lived with some relatives, but she liked a little alcohol and begged. But she was able to do everything and it seems that she loved Mistress Oakes like a new mother, whom she had known for years. She sold tobacco on sidewalks, sometimes flowers, and she earned a living. She soon learned to love Olivia and Lucy. Mistress Oakes was trying to teach the secrets of the Tarot to Olivia, but although she tried hard she didn't guess with property and was not good at predictions, customers did never repeat and she never became Mistress Rivers. In April Mistress Oakes fulfilled her promise to travel to Kirkwall and Olivia learned to miss her so much that she knew she would be her disciple and companion for life. When at last she returned a month later she assured her that she had managed to put the former home of Adam and Estella, her parents, to the name of Lucy Rivers and that she could claim it whenever she wanted. She also brought the scarce money bequeathed her by her father, enough one day for Lucy’s education, even if she wanted to do one day superior studies. Olivia was really grateful and began to accompany her friend, once a month, to the psychiatric hospital of Basin Hall, where Estella Oakes was hospitalized. And she spent six more months with the Silke, until one day the Lord died, and the Lady preferred to be alone, although she gave Olivia enough time to find another job with the Brooke in St Luke’s Gospel. The Brooke were a difficult couple, especially the Lady, but Lucy had a bed to sleep.

  She had already been a year and a half in the street, when a day of February she had the unpleasant surprise of crossing again with her husband the wolf. She was then asking for alms with her mistress in St Mary, and Lucy playing with other children because her mother didn't allow her to beg, when he spoke to her unexpectedly.

─ "Olivia, I have to talk to you. I want to invite you to a cup of coffee."

─ "I do not want to talk to you..." - and said his name.

─ "We will talk. You’d better."

   There was a very clear threat in his eyes that Olivia, without knowing why, felt lost, and looked, somehow, in the hands of the predator again, and though she had no desire to speak to her husband, agreed to have a tea with him.

─ "I have already been informed that we had a daughter." – He began.

─ "I had a daughter." – She said, changing the verbal person.

─ "Well, we will not argue about that. I guess you named her Lucy, as it was always your intention."

─ "Do you really want to know? You never cared about your daughter."

─ "You were not even able to give me a son, but well – seeing in Olivia a clear intention to stand up and run away, he added-, stop that. I guess you know that I live with another woman, the one you saw once in my bed. We have had a son. And Mary and I want to get married. I want you to grant me the divorce."

─ "I have, for the moment, no intention..." - And she said his name again.

─ "I think you should. I don't have any desire to deprive you of your daughter, but you know that I could do it. My surname is very influential and you... you are now only a beggar. If you do not grant me the divorce, there will be a legal battle over her custody and you know that I would win it. Here is the address of a court where you must go tomorrow. It will be unpleasant for you, but you decide. In exchange for the divorce I will allow you to take care of Lucy or whatever her name."

    A wind of infinite bitterness then took her heart so strongly that she saw that she only had an answer left. She could not lose Lucy. Not that.

─ "You win. Tomorrow I will go to court with you. Then I hope not to see you anymore."

    They were two or three days of boredom and some shame, but in the end the matter was resolved. She was no longer his wife and her husband did not threaten her with retaining the custody of Lucy. And thereafter, she felt relief that she had left the burden of speaking with such wolf.

   She could no longer bear Mrs. Brooke, more dragon than Deirdre Merton and soon found a new job with the Vandermeer, where she spent several years. They were very old, but charming. They had a very small apartment and Olivia could not sleep there, but Lucy could, although on the couch, but more sheltered indoors. That suited her. All her free hours she spent begging with Mistress Oakes, Lucy playing, and at nights she brought her home to the Vandermeer’s to sleep. Every morning she was picked up for going to school.

   Lucy spent hours at the Basilica’s or in the other squares of the town, and was getting used to look at life as it had been presented. She wasn’t for her mother a rebellious girl but Olivia didn't know that Madeleine Oakes and she used to spend evenings talking and Lucy with her grandmother had the calm that was permeating her childhood and throughout her life.  She already knew, because her mother had been explaining it to her, how she and her mistress – thus she began to call her affectionately –were earning their living, and she knew well, but didn’t understand that she wasn't allowed to do it.

   Mr. Vandermeer was a retired literature professor and his wife was a housewife but as intelligent as he. He talked of literature often with Olivia, since he knew she was a great reader and a good critic. And Mrs. Vandermeer was pleased that Lucy had refuge on her sofa. She regretted not having more room, but at least she slept warm and safe. In that home in the evenings, at school in the morning, in Umbra Terrae Boulevard in the afternoons, with her mother and her beloved grandmother, Lucy began to find peace and warmth, and not resignation. It was her life and a thousand years she would live in the street watching her mother laugh with her beloved fellow mate.

   But she was not always beside her mother. Often playing with other children in St Paul's square, and one day when she was coming out of school, accompanying her friend Moira Mason, she found a man a bit older than her mother. First the gentleman greeted Moira and then turned to her:

─ "You must be Lucy. You're as gorgeous as Olivia. Don't panic: you do not know me, but I am your uncle Gerald, brother of your mother - and then opened his wallet and showed her a photo where there were three people-. This is your mother, and in the middle your aunt Kirsten, I don't know if your mother has spoken to you about her."

─ "She has, more than once."

─ "Your grandfather passed away and you have a grandmother that has very little time. She is dying of cancer and wants to meet you. Look, Lucy, you can come to your mother, but don't talk to her about me. You can tell her that your friend Moira wants to invite you to lunch. I would like you to come with me to Hunter’s Arrows to see your grandmother. If you agree, I will wait for you in the church of St Mary within one hour."

    Lucy had no fear of that gentleman who so resembled her mother. In addition, Olivia had shown her some photos of when she was young and had often told her of Kirsten, her grandparents and even about Gerald. She didn’t often talk of them but something she had heard.

   Her mother gave her permission to go to lunch at the Mason’s, but also told her not to do this many times. And Moira and she went to St Mary where her uncle Gerald was waiting for her. They caught a taxi and were at once in Hunter’s Arrows.

    The landscape of Downhills startled her. By Hunter’s Arrows nearly passed the river and melancholy invaded her seeing from what paradise her mother had been expelled. His uncle Gerald looked shocked and seemed to understand her. He pointed out The Curve, the home of the Mason, and promised to take her immediately to know Moira’s house.

   Hunter’s Arrows seemed a garden compared with the houses or streets that her mother had had to live in. It was greatly illuminated, but to Lucy it seemed a dark place, cold and soulless. Her uncle wanted her to see her grandmother’s room so that she met her, but Lucy was, as her mother in her day, absorbed in the stained glass, that of the swans. Her mother had spoken about it on numerous occasions and told her the comments that she and her sister did. Yes, it was just as she had imagined it and was rapt in the blue of the water and nearly wept to see the swan that they were going to shoot.

   She went immediately by the hand of her uncle to the room where her grandmother was waiting for her with her best smile. She wasn't expecting to find her almost a ghost of gray hair and always at war with herself. She felt more than ever when she met her grandmother Linda that actually the mother of her mother was Madeleine Oakes. The room had the smell of death, in the knowledge that it was imminent. The bed had been, so it seemed, the bed where this woman had slept with a grandfather she never knew. On the bedside table there was a photo with her three children, Olivia when she was fifteen smiling with her brothers on the banks of the Heatherling. The spectrum of her grandmother then spoke.

─ "So you're Lucy. I wanted to see you, beautiful. Look, today is Monday and I don't think that I live to the next. I would have liked to see you before, but your mother did not follow a straight line. Do not worry. I am not going to talk bad of her. I will die believing firmly what I have believed in recent years. But my mistake was not to see that a particular case can be different to a general case, and as your uncle Gerald has told me, a lot of things your mother has been forced to. But tell me something about you. Are you happy?"- Then she looked at her son Gerald as if recalling something that they were scheming.

   Lucy didn't know what to tell and went on tiptoe through the few houses where her mother had worked, and mainly spoke of her days of school, her friend Moira and the desire to eat something with her. Then Gerald spoke.

─ "Now we will go to Moira’s. But before that, let me ask you a question: would you like to learn to swim? In this area the Heatherling makes small lakes with calm water. Here we have old bathing suits from your mother, who never learned, but had a bath every summer with her sister. I could teach you. But later you must tell your mother that Edward Mason, Moira’s brother, is teaching you. And that can be the excuse for you to come back here throughout this week."

   Lucy was surprised how quickly she learned to swim. It took her only two days in which she was clearly doing friendship with an uncle she loved soon and forever. Then actually they went to the home of the Mason and she met Edward and his parents, of the same name as their children. She had a small twinge of pain to see how the other children had a home and a family. She had just met her grandmother Linda, a woman of strong ideas. She repented of her part in losing a daughter but even at the end of her life, she seemed only concerned about Lucy. At 9 in the evening they caught another taxi that would leave her at St Mary's, where his uncle was to pick her up every day, reminding her that she should not say to her mother that she had met him, only the Mason. And with that excuse, Lucy would come every day to Downhills, because she explained that Edward Mason was teaching her to swim. Her mother gave her permission to go several more days, but emphasizing that she should not become a nuisance for them. Mistress Oakes seemed to sense the truth and looked at her nodding, and understanding.

   On successive days, she learned well that Madeleine Oakes was a mother for her mother, what her grandmother Linda never was. She loved her uncle each day more and more. While she was aware Linda told her things from her mother in her late teens and one day Gerald and she took courage and spoke to her.

─ "You have told us you're legally Lucy Rivers, and we are not going to forget you. Much of the money from the Rivers would go into your hands and your mother could have a house, but to your name, and a lot of money."

   They named her the amount and it was true that it was a small fortune, but her grandmother and uncle, despite everything, left Olivia out of the will. She appreciated them, and for her mother said she would accept it. They might have a home. But Lucy was changing from a girl into a woman then. She loved her mother and began to understand why one day she broke away from the Rivers. Her uncle and her grandmother were not bad people, but were still clinging to a past that no longer existed, a past as they thought that it must have been. A time each afternoon learning to swim and another time at the Mason’s and then returned to the Umbra Terrae Boulevard with her mother and the woman who truly was her grandmother.

   Tuesday and Wednesday Lucy knew her grandmother a little better. She evoked happy times when she was still Linda Hamilton, and something told her about her grandfather Gerald Rivers I and her time with him. It did not seem an absorbing love, but it was true that they had loved. She was glad of that part at least. On Thursday Linda Rivers was already unconscious and Lucy lived for the first time death face to face. She was going little by little and on Friday afternoon, while she was there, she died. Finally she went without troubling and Gerald began to cry as a lunatic and Lucy did everything she could for him, mainly to kiss him and hug him while she also cried.

─ "Tonight I will have to tell my sister, but meanwhile, Lucy, don’t say anything. And when you see me, remember that you do not know me. I'm going to sell Hunter’s Arrows and I'm going to buy a house in Chamberlain Street. Here's the address. Come within a week and we'll talk about your inheritance. And now we are going to St Mary. Then I'll come back to cry and watch over the body of my mother."

   That night when she reached the Boulevard she found her mother and Mistress Oakes laughing at one thing that Shannon Dee had told, and Lucy had the first big doubt, what would be of her mother's life if she now separated her from Mistress Oakes. Shortly after she was speaking enthusiastically of something different.

─ "Today I was speaking with Madeleine, daughter, and I said something about the year in which we were, and she told me a different thing that made me see it any other way." She told me that my life had begun when I had you, and that the year of your birth, was the year 0. So now we would be in the year 9."


 

─And since then it has been so Protch. Counting the years in any other way is happiness for us. The year 0 was put for Lucy. And if you find it difficult to know what year it is remember that I was born on July 30, in the year 0.

─Then now I know when it was. And now we are then in the year 33. And it seems you also love Lucy, as much as her mother or Mistress Oakes. I just have to wait and see when you enter into the story and how you got to know them.

─You will have to wait to know why, but I would be unable to express how much I love Lucy. Now you will know her a bit better, when the third story turns finally into her history.


 

   Lucy was lost in thought seeing that even without knowing Olivia had found a mother where she never had one. Her grandmother Linda could have been, but not wanting to do her an injustice, in her later years, she had not been. Lucy understood that to take her mother away from Mistress Oakes now would be like death, and began to meditate seriously on the testament. The money would only be on behalf of Lucy Rivers and her mother would be forced to rely on her. In addition, what would she do with Mistress Oakes, for her already her grandmother? In this she was thinking when her uncle Gerald appeared. Lucy concealed well that she already knew him.

─ "Olivia, love, once more I have something to tell you."

─ "Do not talk to me, Mr. Rivers."

─ "It is inevitable that I tell you Mother died today. She couldn’t overcome a cancer that she had. The funeral will be tomorrow."

─ "You know, Mr. Rivers – she said crying. Mistress Oakes watched her understanding her, but she never spoke to Gerald Rivers, who only because of Lucy was aware of who that woman was - that I will not go to the funeral. After a few days, I'll be back to the cemetery to see my sister, and I will also bring flowers to dad and mom and pray for them. But I want to be alone. I appreciate that you have come to tell me about it, Mr. Rivers, but now let me weep alone."

   Her mother went with her and Mistress Oakes three days later to the cemetery, and Lucy felt strange not to be able to say that she had just met her grandmother recently buried there. But another grandmother accompanied her and suddenly spoke as if she knew what Lucy was feeling.

─ "Do what your heart tells you, Lucy."

    A week later, she went to the address that her uncle had given her in Chamberlain Street. Hunter’s Arrows was for sale and meanwhile Gerald’s new flat was refurbishing and it was difficult to find things. The walls were full of pictures that her uncle told her that had been painted by her aunt Kirsten. Some time later, these pictures were occupying other rooms of the house, and they were replaced by a collection of swords. Lucy spoke to his uncle.

─ "It will soon be a beautiful house, Uncle Gerald. And I'll keep coming to see you on the sly, because you are my family and I have learned to love you. But listen to me, uncle. I have come to tell you another thing. I don't want my inheritance. Not if my mother now has to depend on me."

─ "Lucy, love. I am a lawyer and I can change the terms of the will."

─ "Forgive me, uncle. I love you; I don't think my mother is happy with the money of the Rivers. She already has another life, and is determined to live by herself. I don't know if she knows that she is happy, but last night I saw her laughing with Mistress Oakes. And after all she takes care of me. I am her main concern and she alone must care that I succeed. And I'm not ambitious. I want to grow seeing her happy and proud of the life she’s living, without depending on anyone. I know that one day I could repent of what I'm saying, and perhaps then I will come and talk to you to ask that the testament be as it should have been, but it would be including Mistress Oakes. I know that you don't know her, but she has left me the money she inherited from her parents for my education, and I will not be rich without my mother and her. The three of us must live as we can but still being us and please, no offense. If one day things are really bad for us, I am in contact with you and know that you’ll help."

─ "You are very mature, Lucy. And I see that you know what you want. I respect what you say, but please still contact me, and if you truly need it, here I will always be."

   And thus uncle and niece understood each other and were always in communication. Her mother spoke about him very scarcely, but one day she knew him matched to one such Kate and although she never knew why, one day she learned that he had gone to jail, a time that Lucy could not visit him, but they were always in contact.

    It is thus how Lucy was the youngest in finding her motif by Verôme, and as all of us who came later, rejecting temptation, knowing that a layer of gold looks good and dresses elegantly, but does not always last. Many times in her later years she wondered if she had done well at that time, but she was seeing her mother learning her identity on miserable sidewalks, next to the woman who truly had always been as a mother for her. Her life was Mistress Oakes, and of course Lucy, and the latter had the courage to accept a life without money in compensation for the unwanted parasitism and own independence. She never took the house in Kirkwall. For this reason I repeat, Protch, that the first four beggars were forced, but it is not all that simple, and they also chose this life and the eight agree that money could have ruined our lives, sooner or later, but we learned to straighten us and get out of it towards the other beauties of life, and not less than none, our blessed freedom, which makes us live, and the pleasure of an incorruptible friendship of which the eight participate.

  They spent some years in Umbra Terrae Boulevard. If until then it was Olivia that would have remorse for not having taken her daughter out of the street, then it was Lucy who was never sure of having done well by rejecting her inheritance, but noticed that her mother had life beside Mistress Oakes and so far rejected the money that her uncle Gerald could give them one day. She heard her mother often say that she would accept any money, through charity or any other means, except money that could reach her from the Rivers. Lucy listened and was silent. They were the three in the street together, sometimes in the company of Shannon Dee, who would not be sane, but that it was clear that she also saw in Mistress Oakes a mother wanting her more than her mother. And she soon found a job at a greengrocer. Sometimes she returned to the street, but knew how to earn a living. And her affection for Olivia and Lucy was more than evident.

   Still in the Boulevard Lucy heard one night her grandmother with Henry Shaw, of whom later I will tell you more. In those moments he was an alcoholic who lived on the street after the death of his wife in a traffic accident.


 

-“That’s why I tell you, Protch, that sometimes love makes it impossible to continue your life if the person you love is gone. First Henry Shaw; and now I will speak about Mildred Hugg.

─I agree with you, Nike. If Maude went before me, I could not resist it but two days.

─Do not remember those things. It will make you unhappy now that your wife is not here. But she will return and think of the years that you could still spend together.


 

─ "Agreed, Henry. If you think I'm worth for that."

─ "I have already spoken with Sheila Grant and Vince McFarlane. It would be of the three. Or of the four as long as I live. I will make keys for all.

    In the year 13 they moved to Wrathfall Bridge. They had already met the fourth of us, of whom I will speak about. The Great Hospital Philip Rage was then under construction and that neighborhood, called Castlebridge as well as Knights Bridge was still known as Castle Bridge, was at that time the slum of the city and was dangerous, but perhaps not for beggars, who did not have anything worth stealing. From the bridge to the north, passing through the hospital, the street was called Wall Street, because there still was, as a skeleton of what it had been, a door in the wall. To the east the Kilmourne, and to get to it and Wrathfall Bridge, hundreds of elms were escorting its steep descents. Yet it was the Seductress Outskirt, beautiful name perhaps, but not a very good place. But maybe now, with the construction of the hospital, it could become a safer place.

   They had been a week in the Seductress Outskirt when history repeated: Mr. Vandermeer died, and the Lady, called Linda like her mother, preferred to stay alone. Olivia found herself homeless again until a week later she began working for Miss Jocelyn Ackroyd. She looked like a good woman, but she had some mental failure. Then there was no name; we would today call it bipolar. But Lucy could sleep there and that was the important thing. She lived in Longborough Street, right next to the law firm of Aubrey, Fielding and McDawn. The McDawn surname was not abandoning her.

   In Wrathfall Bridge were sleeping Mistress Oakes and Olivia and Lucy ever with her, in the eye closest to the river. Three dry eyes had the bridge on the west side and the adjacent eye was where our fourth fellow mate used to sleep. As the area was dangerous, Lucy never went out alone and was accompanied to school and then to the High School where she studied her secondary education by Mistress Oakes, Olivia or our fourth mate, at any time.

   She didn’t sleep there, but they soon met Mildred Hugg, who was a hairdresser until the death of her husband Jonah. The love that she had him was so deep that due to remaining a widow she began to drink and little by little she lost everything. He had one son; two years older than Lucy, called Ephraim, and also asked for alms. When she saw another child grown up in the street, Olivia already allowed Lucy begging, if she wished, but beside Ephraim, where her mother could not see her. Mildred was a good woman when sober, which happened on rare occasions, and his son was getting the same disease, who sometimes drank more than he should. But she wanted Lucy so much and in one of her few moments of lucidity, one afternoon she decided to teach her the art of hairdressing. Lucy was a great student and her mother and her grandmother were willing to see her learn and try with them. In a month she knew all the tricks of the trade and learned different ways to cut the hair or the beard, rehearsing with our fourth mate and Ephraim. Lucy wasn't sure that one day she would get out of the street if she had to leave there her mother and her grandmother, but the truth is that with Mrs. Hugg she had learned a trade.

   Olivia had been a month with Miss Ackroyd when she was fired for something stupid. She insisted that her servant had not cleaned a room that she was sure to have cleaned thoroughly. It was useless to argue with her. Jocelyn Ackroyd was a good woman or could be, but imagined things that never happened. It was a luxurious, but small, easy to handle house but Olivia was suddenly right out in the street.

   But a month later she met Jocelyn’s silhouette in the Basilica. She did not come to ask for forgiveness but to say she needed her and forgave her, but it was clear that she was convinced she was right, the guilty one was Olivia. But she wanted a home for her daughter to sleep, as there were days in which they slept even in parks or automatic cash machines. And she returned.

   She was there five more years, until Lucy was 18. Talks between the Lady and her maid were scarce as Olivia saw well that she would let Lucy sleep there, but she never loved her and blamed her for many things. And a July 2 came the great crisis that would change everything. Lucy was not allowed to enter the toy room, but the truth is that she did not need them. And Miss Ackroyd used to keep numerous jewels there inherited from her ancestors, because the Ackroyd family was indeed still landowners and noble. But that day in early July, she told Olivia that she had lost a gold bracelet.

─ "It was in the toy room, Olivia, and it must have been Lucy."

─ "Miss Ackroyd, what do you think? Lucy would be unable to. Probably you have lost it."

─ "I am very careful with my jewelry and I do not lose anything. Your daughter is already a woman, and must have had this temptation. In any case, I will give two days. If it has not appeared by then, I will report her."

   Olivia believed her highly capable, because in addition to the frequent delusions of Jocelyn Ackroyd, she knew that she had never loved Lucy. The mother spoke with the daughter anyway, who assured her that it was even more than one year that she had not entered the toy room. Olivia believed her. Probably Jocelyn had lost the bracelet and she searched the entire house through to find it but it was not found. Then she was desperate. Not that; It could not happen that she could see her daughter in a trial or in jail maybe. She had some money saved. Without thinking twice, she went to the law firm of Aubrey, Fielding and McDawn.

   Once inside she asked about Mr. Miguel McDawn, in the hope that it was Brenda’s nephew. They led her to him. He certainly seemed that teenager who she had seen in photographs, Matthew’s son. When she said her name, Olivia Rivers, she was recognized by Miguel at once. He also had photos of her and Lucy, who had come with her mother.

─ "Are you the Olivia that worked for my aunt?"

─ "Yes, and you are her nephew Miguel, Matthew’s son. How is Brenda?"

─ "Until the last minute she remembered you and your daughter."

─ "Until the last minute?"

─ "My aunt passed away."

   Sad tears began to wash her face and seized all her body. She had almost no strength to ask.

─ "How was it? And when?"

─ "It was in February. You know she always had a delicate stomach and could not adapt to the food of my country. But on her deathbed, she named you always. And the time that she was in Cádiz she got a miracle. My mother and my aunt Consolación speak little, but she managed to reconcile the two brothers. And my parents have moved to Cádiz. Now I'm just alone in this country, working as a lawyer. I am glad to have known the Olivia that always mentioned my aunt Brenda. I loved her very much. But tell me, what brings you here? "

   Of that meeting neither Olivia nor Miguel left undamaged. Can love be explained as an arrow shot suddenly that takes the heart and leaves it marked? Olivia was then a quarter of an hour telling all that had happened at the house of Jocelyn Ackroyd and how she believed that the threat could be carried out.

─ "And if that happens, I have some money so that you take care of her defense. Lucy hasn't done anything, and may not end up in prison."

─ "As you are the Olivia that my aunt loved so much and named constantly on her deathbed, I will not charge you anything. My aunt told me that you had been a beggar. Are you now?"

─ "I am."

─ "I will speak with Miss Ackroyd. We know each other personally. And I'll see what I can do."

─ "Thank you, Mr. McDawn."

─ "Miguel, please."

─ "Thank you, Miguel."

    They appointed to meet a week later. But meanwhile the circumstances had changed. Miss Ackroyd found the bracelet at her friend Mary’s, where she had let it fall. She wanted to apologize to Olivia, but she would not know anything about Miss Ackroyd. And something else. The experience made that Olivia abandon hereinafter to work for more ladies. Thereafter, she already was with the street as her only way of life. She thanked Miguel McDawn, who in the end did not have to do anything for her. Lucy would already be able to abandon misery, if she found work, because at least she knew a trade.

   But Lucy never wanted to leave the street where she was each time surer that her mother would always be, together with her grandmother and her fourth mate. All her life in this mud, Protch. She was born in manure and will die in this mire, the face of the sun, and the face of the moon reflected in her beautiful crystals, the scented elms, ash trees and alders, custodians of the rooms where she has gone to sleep, homeless but considering the streets as her true home, that she would never leave according to all appearances.


 

   Once upon a time there was a man of humble appearance that has it all, from whose pristine beards emerge golden rays. His legs are tireless and walk the whole city. He has another way to move through the streets and goes house to house, while others stop in any square or temple, and if walking means health, he can still resist many years, despite some ill-fated omen that has almost taken him, but nothing can defeat him. And if one day our dishes do not have anything to fill with, there he is, our last hope, responsible for donating food or the pleasure of his pleasant company. He is not considered an intelligent man, but I disagree with this opinion, and he knows how to survive in the hostile world that he has known.

   And now I must turn back to remind you of a character which I hope you have not forgotten: Joe Scully, the great love of Mistress Oakes’ life. He was a free and adventurous man until he got the dream of his life, and so many times to get it is to feel disappointed and faded. It was so, as I already told you, that he was one day in the cinema and his neighbour in the seat beside him began to speak to him. He was very friendly with her and inadvertently was rewarded. She introduced herself with a nothing frequent surname but which had to be of the same lineage of one of the great fortunes of the city. Beatrice was nice and it was easy to buy her a drink after the film. There he knew that she was the daughter of the potentate who ran several companies. The best of Joe was his kindness and his ability to listen and was chatting with her all night and Beatrice did not end unscathed. It was so different this bohemian man of the mirror maze to all the men that she had known that she fell madly in love with him. They appointed to meet the next day and Joe had already begun to devise his dream of one day marrying a rich woman, also an affable and nice girl. She was pretty in addition but that didn't matter to him. He feared to have broken Madeleine Oakes’s heart, his great passion, but they often made love, until she definitely left him two years later, insisting that he had chosen Beatrice and now he was meant for her. All life he recalled his dear Maddie, but he did not have her anymore.

    Surely the decision to choose between love and money has brought ruin to more than one, but Joe believed that he had achieved the dream of his life, and had to persevere in it. He saw Beatrice often and took care to leave her pregnant, so she had no choice but, in those days, to marry. Some of Beatrice’ sisters, such as Claire, Sonia and Yvonne knew the truth before his father and the affable character of Joe won them, in some cases even more than necessary, as Joe has always been a womanizer and flirted often with them, especially with Claire. But already pregnant, they married and one day Joe had to tell the truth to Madeleine Oakes, and broke her heart, no less than his own, because until his death Joe loved her, and who knows if that dismal choice between love and money would not end up taking him.

    But there was a day in which Beatrice decided to finally speak with her father. This was a man of sour character who then went on to ask her who was that such Joe Scully and reproached his daughter that he had married her for her money surely. Beatrice was then deeply in love, but began to open her eyes and realized the possible truthfulness of what her father told her. But that pain made her angrier and father and daughter had a strong argument that would end up separating them for life. He was not willing, he said, that any Joe Scully whosoever inherited part of his fortune. He was only determined to leave his daughter a small pension with which the couple ended up selling the mirror maze and setting up a small business, a butcher's shop next to their home in Arcade.

    Arcade was then, and still is, a fairly ill kept industrial district, but neither poor nor dangerous. It is the only district of the city on the east bank of the river. There among waters and some small unpretentious square would grow my fourth fellow mate. Meanwhile, in pregnancy Joe and Beatrice began to savor what would be their life in common. Both knew that they had made a mistake in that marriage, but they had already accepted that they would be together for life. They did not love each other, but appreciated each other and respected. Joe was clearly cheating, but Beatrice forgave all of his treasons, but she didn't take it well, one day she found old love letters from her husband, the passion that he still felt according to all appearances, for one such Madeleine. But even so her pregnancy continued smoothly and finally she had one day in May her only son.


 

─And here I have to stop, Protch, to talk to you about him, because you know him.

─Maybe, Nike. But you have not told me what his name is.

─Bruce.

─I know one beggar called Bruce, but I never asked him his surname. I don't know if it may be your mate.

–I brought him to Deanforest a couple of times, when it still belonged to me. Then he came to this house one day when you still did not have a gardener, and you tried to take care of it. That is what he has told me at least. He came to beg as always, house to house, and he found you trying to handle yourself with rhododendrons, without success. My fellow mate has been everything, also a gardener, and he gave you some instructions. And you, grateful to him, invited him to a beer in the kitchen. And he became a regular visitor and often conversed with Maudie and you. You had already given up smoking, but you got used to buying packs of tobacco for him. And since then, my fellow mate Bruce came here frequently and he has been as a link between you and me.

─I agree with you that he is an intelligent man. And affectionate. But Holy heaven, so much time wanting to know about you and not finding the way to find out. It never occurred to me to think that possibly Bruce, whom I appreciate really, might know of your whereabouts.


 

   Bruce Scully spent his childhood with some emotional lack.  He was not good at studies and it was already clear that one day he would abandon them and would work. He had several friends, among them Edgar Sullivan, who often was accompanied by his little sister, Miranda. He got along well with his aunts, especially his aunt Claire, who came to the home of his parents frequently. His parents... one day he surprised a conversation they had in the kitchen.

─ "You still love that such Madeleine, right?"

─ "Beatrice, my life. We do not hide us the truth years ago. I will always love her. You also have your love affairs and it seems correct to me. You and I don't love each other, but we get along well and have a child in common. Love is not the important thing. Being husband and wife and parents will make us proceed with care. Neither you nor I have the life we dreamed of a day, but it is our life and we belong to each other."

   Thus he learned with surprise that his parents did not love. One day Joe, telling the truth to his son, recommended him to not marry ever a rich girl.

─ "Follow your dream in life, whatever, and pursue it without letting yourself be blinded by the money."

   Those words marked him, because from then on he wondered many times what his dream was and did not find an answer. But he did not have a bitter childhood. His parents liked each other and even laughed sometimes. On occasion they reached a crisis. He didn't know why but he felt it watching his father sleeping on the couch. But the next day they used to make amends, and his parents learned somehow to live together with the solid root of affection, a root less dangerous often than love.

   Bruce would be alone many times, but the best of childhood is the small details you treasure, and it is a period of life in which the memories are games and ugly Arcade district had a river of diamond that he watched spellbound, but didn’t enter because he could not swim. So in his childhood sometimes he felt alone, and occasionally in his teens, but without knowing it, he was happy and he observed his parents, happy or distant, and it was an important lesson at least for what he didn't want to do for his life.

    But he knew very young that what is not desired in life is death, and less if it is premature and fast. He had just become fifteen when illness attacked his father in a mortal way. My fellow mate failed to explain what it was, but by the symptoms I have deduced that it could be some fulminant case of leukemia. The truth is that Joe Scully passed away in fifteen days.

   Bruce was every afternoon with his father, after High School, although he didn't want to continue studying. These days his father often talked to him and Bruce knew many family secrets that I might someday tell you. Constantly there came their aunts Claire and Yvonne, and he heard his mother say.

─ "I have never been able to appreciate how much I like him. I was in love with him two years and surely that is not forgotten. But without love we have always lived and yet I want him very much and he has made me happy."

   His father finally died and the last word that came out of his mouth was Maddie. In those moments he was not with his mother there and he was happy. Then a grayish day it was his funeral and Beatrice showed her son, weeping a lot that, after all, the Scully couple had been very happy. And of what I tell you, because you know not even everything, part of the story may be a lie, but Bruce is not false, he is upright and transparent as the eyes of a person who does not love.

   A bitter wind made him suffer a small depression, and his friend Edgar Sullivan told him that there were jobs for minors as stevedores in the harbour, and Bruce agreed and began to work there, where he was several years, not always with the same work, but becoming a man and earning his money, along with his friend Edgar and other friends he had, among others Brian Soul, who spoke often of his old friend Frankie Lauders, who however soon was arrested for rape. Loading and unloading ships he didn’t have much time to think, but there he was maturing his philosophy of life: to work without ambition so that his life wasn't like his father’s. Even though the Kilmourne did not look at the ocean, an afternoon he watched it as if viewed from there he could learn something of the lives on the other side of the sea. The harbour breathed scents from overseas, noiseless, plenteous, and evocative. Bruce quietly examined the Ocean heading to and from the far Americas, those huge vessels suggesting him the promise of unknown lands and pageantry at the table. He would never lack an abundant dinner if he ever embarked one day beyond the sea.

   Thus, earning a living by himself, working hard and philosophizing, Bruce arrived to a first youth, solitary but enriching. And at a party at his friend Edgar’s he was surprised one day by an up and down that we all have felt sometimes with fury: love. His sister Miranda had turned into a beautiful young woman who snatched his heart. He loved her madly, but he did not dare to say anything. But he supposed that Miranda always knew of his love. But soon he had a huge shock, the first great terror of his life: Miranda was diagnosed with a tumor. It was then when Bruce started to get free time to spend each day with her.

─ "It is better not to reciprocate you, Bruce. What sense would it make now that I know I'm going to go soon? I greatly appreciate the time you spend at my side and when I am no more, remember that you always had my love. Take care of my brother Edgar."

─ "Do not speak thus, Miranda, still some of the treatments you receive could heal you and you can live more years, and know a man who you do love and makes you happy."

─ "I know already I have no solution, Bruce. Some more months and it’ll be over. I'll not get to be twenty years old. But living was worth, and I have met people like you. I wish I could have lived with you, in love with, but it has not been possible. You will always remember me, but you'll see how there is another woman in your life who is your great love."

   It was two more months that she resisted. He accompanied her each day and checked how she was losing strength. Finally she expired in his arms, leaving a signature in his heart with his last words.

─ "Good bye, my beloved Bruce, I love you."

   It was a week or more extremely hard in his life, but a pain is often accompanied by a harder pain and that happened. Her brother Edgar could not resist it. He could no longer bear the Arcade area or the city of Hazington and ended up finding a job in Central America and migrating.

    Pain can be terminated if not accompanied immediately of another equally large pain. His mother went to spend a month at her sister Yvonne’s house and suddenly had a bite from a dog. You can see that it had rabies. She was admitted to a hospital and Bruce at least had time to say goodbye to her. If he felt lonely more than once, however he could never complain about how much his parents had loved him. But doctors could not do anything for Beatrice Scully, who died in a very short time.

   Orphan and no prospects, he had a depression that accompanied him several years. He couldn't stand his house of Arcade. The neighborhood inevitably reminded him of his parents and Miranda, all he had and now he didn’t. He learned of the need for stevedores there was in Spoke, the most important village of the Kilmourne, some 60 km to the west and leaving his house in the care of his aunt Sonia, moved to this city.

   In Spoke, he learned many things and not all of them good. He worked as everything the same as an electrician, as a gardener, a plumber, a waiter... but the harpy depression was not going and he never saved enough money to have one day a comfortable future. You will notice in my words, Protch, that I have many gaps in the story of Bruce, but my fellow mate told me his story in general and I only know long periods: his years at the harbour, his years in Spoke, where he went to the street, the only one of us who wouldn't do so in Hazington, his two years begging.

    He had saved for several years, but sometimes the tragedy comes from where you've put the trust. The bank where he kept his savings went bankrupt and a good day he saw himself without a single dain. He did not know what to do. He walked to try to clarify his ideas by the surroundings of the castle of Spoke at night because he knew that there would be no one there as it is the typical well-preserved castle that evokes witches, goblins and ghosts and chance led him to sit on a bench where there was a beggar doing his job, who started to talk to him, and unconsciously Bruce opened his hand also while he heard what little the other beggar had to tell.

─ "My name is Frank Lauders, but you can call me Frankie. I have been in prison for ten years and out, I found myself without a job and I came to Spoke thinking that I could get one and I used to work but now I'm on the street."

─ "The name is familiar to me for having heard it of Brian Soul. Have you worked for a time in the harbour of Hazington?"

─ "Yes, I'm from Hazington. My father was an eminence in chemistry but died while I was in prison. Helen, my mother, used to beg with him – what he never told Bruce is that he had exhausted the family money, because he was an alcoholic, a compulsive gambler and had some other addictions-. Then she was sheltered in the house of Mr. and Mrs. Nubbs, in Downhills. I saw my mother once before she died, but she passed away also. In the end I came to Spoke, where I've been a year."

   The big problem Bruce had then, in addition to the loss of all his money, was loneliness. Frankie Lauders was a womanizer and a playboy, but spoke to him of the freedom he had on the street that was not subject to hours of work and other independences. Bruce thought that month he had paid the flat, but only this month and he had nothing to eat. Frankie had spoken of moving an hour to the main square of the village, and there he was begging with him. What an irony. His father had been a victim of money and he of loneliness, and although Frank Lauders was never very nice he felt accompanied. He decided that he would lose nothing by trying to beg a few days while he found another job, but on the street he began to be himself, in the company of Frankie, who did not speak much about himself, until six months later he knew why he had been imprisoned. He didn’t like to know at the end that it had been for three rapes, but he followed with him.

   They both realized that they increasingly more often spoke with homesickness of Hazington and one day of our year 13 they decided to move to our city. Bruce moved everywhere, learning to go from house to house, except for the Arcade area. He was not with strength to wander begging in his old neighborhood.

   One night they were in St Mark’s Gospel, in the village, when there came two women and a girl. The womanizer Frankie was captivated by Olivia, for her she was, and began to molest her. Embarrassed, Olivia didn't know what to do, and wanted to get away of that lousy man. Frankie continued saying obscene things awhile, and at the end, Bruce had to stop him.

─ "Frankie, you're an idiot. Leave them alone."

   Frank didn’t like to hear this and so he said to his fellow mate and went away and Bruce felt compelled to apologize to those ladies. With a red face, he said to them:

─ "I’m really sorry for what has happened. Believe me that I do not intend to do the same. But I apologize on behalf of the two. My name is Bruce Scully."

   Hearing his name, Mistress Oakes had no choice but to ask.

─ “Scully? Do you know by chance Joe Scully?

─ "I used to know a Joe Scully, but he already died. It was my father."

─ "Your mother was called Beatrice and your father had the mirror maze?"

─ "Yes. Can I ask you what your name is?"

─ "Madeleine Oakes."

─ "Madeleine. Can you be Maddie?"

─ "Your father always called me thus."

─ "The last word my father said when he died was Maddie. He loved you madly, right?"

─ "You could be angry for this reason. He loved me, yes, but then he met your mother and married her. I knew that Joe had died. But it is a pleasure to get to know his son. You look like him. Bruce, why don’t you stay with us tonight? With Joe’s son, we will be always safe. But you may want to go back with that lousy man."

─ "Definitely my time with Frank Lauders is over already."

    Now they began to speak of the Lauders, because Olivia wanted to know if he was the son of Helen and Solomon. Both of them had died already.

─ "I will greet him when I see him, but now I won't go again with him. But we used to sleep here, near St Mark’s Gospel, and he could return. How would you like to move to Wrathfall Bridge?"

   They were a while discussing the proposal, but while they did they were verifying that Bruce was a gentleman, very different from the companion who was with him.  Wrathfall Bridge was in the Seductress Outskirt, a dangerous neighborhood, but they decided to move there for nothing they feared by his side. Of the three eyes on this side of the river, the three women chose the closest to the water, and Bruce went to sleep to the adjacent eye. Before that they dined together and told more than one thing and Mistress Oakes, who had dreamed that one day they would be eight, felt that they were already four. The loneliness of his youth was being forgotten but it was giving way to other feelings. It was strong, and while all his life he would remember Miranda, he fell madly in love with Olivia, the great love of his life, although he never had enough self-confidence to tell her. Today he still loves her, Protch.

   The three women at the same time invited him to stay with them and he accepted, provided that he was not a nuisance for them. He had his impact also on Lucy, already a teenager, who really cared for him. He has long been the gentleman who protected them. He began to accompany them to the Basilica, but it didn't make much sense that the four begged together, and soon he began to leave them alone, give great walks and go to meet them somewhere agreed to go back the four of them home, now definitely Wrathfall Bridge. There he was many years, guardian of his three ladies, accompanied and happy when like a sailor he curls up among the blankets of his three women fellow mates. They are the boundary lines and he is the country.

 

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[1] Primula: a ten-dain note. Plural primulas or primulae.