God's Loving Embrace

Part One

Preparations for the Final Mandate

May 2024

'But if any provide not for his own, and specially for those of his own house, he hath denied the faith, and is worse than an infidel.'

1 Timothy 5:8

No one spelled the situation out, to Eloise, or to young Grace. Not in so many words at any rate. Maybe that was a kindness, of sorts. Having only just finished watching their father die neither teenager was quite ready to face up to their uncertain future. Both cried, rather a lot at first, and their aunt was a great comfort to them, in many ways. Despite her obvious religious inclinations and her elevated status, Lady Trevor hugged them and wept with them, offering as much solace as she could muster in the circumstances. Her stern guardian, a formidable character called Miss Howard, stayed well away most of the time, having almost nothing to do with the girl's initial welfare. She had all the others to look after, including Lady Trevor's own children, two bonny little boys, and seemed strangely content to leave the grieving girls to her mystifying mistress.

It was almost surreal to Eloise. For almost a week, since the Trevors had arrived, quite out of the blue, the house had been full of these total strangers and their weird servants, and many other aides who came and went without her really noticing them, people who she did not really know other than as scribbled names in a Christmas card, if at all, or from their pictures in the newspapers, or reports on the evening news. She was not really a child, anymore. She was sixteen, and she had studied the Christian Renaissance in Great Britain at her school, in a modern history class, well aware that she had a few relatives involved in it all back home, but that seemed like a distant world to her then, and had nothing at all to do with her own life in Melbourne. So she watched all these bizarre people dancing around the edges of her misery in awe, unable to understand them but knowing that she needed them, somehow. Everyone was there to help her and her sister, and her mother of course. It was good of their relatives to come and she was grateful, but also bemused by the circus that surrounded them, and their outlandish behaviour.

Her parents had emigrated when she was just five and Grace only three, to escape recession hit Europe at the time, and what they had called the broken society at home, for the sun and undiluted promise of Australia. Six years before Charles Buckingham led the Reformist's, in the form of the Christian Democratic Party, to power in Great Britain. Eloise's grandparents were all dead, one of the reasons her dear parents felt able to emigrate, and other than a few cousins they only ever really saw at weddings, christenings and funerals, none of them had anything to regret leaving behind, and after so long away Eloise did not feel that much of a connection to the place her mother still called 'home' and both girls still habitually referred to in the same way. But all of a sudden, right in the middle of the worst possible nightmare she could imagine, some of those relatives had just arrived out of the blue, simply to help. It was a miracle. Just when they needed help, their cousins were right there.

Eloise was surprised and touched by the gesture. Her uncle was a busy and important man of course, of national importance in Britain, a very famous man with a vital job to do, a government minister, so his willingness to just drop everything and come out to help a family he did not really know was so impressive. But no one had mentioned what would happen next, because it was all such a mess. Eloise knew that her father's small business was failing simply because he was too ill to work in his last months, and her poor mum was really just that, her mum, a housewife who had not worked since her first child was born, quite certainly incapable of just picking up the pieces of their lives even if she was not devastated by their loss, which she so clearly was. So in the end, because Eloise wanted to think about something else so badly, she simply had to ask the most obvious of questions. It was burning up inside her, because the answer was too obvious, but also frightening and overwhelming somehow.