A Powerful Little Love

Chapter 32

The Reassurance by Thom Gunn

About ten days or so

After we saw you dead

You came back in a dream.

I'm alright now you said.

And it was you, although

You were fleshed out again

ou hugged us all around then,

And gave your welcoming beam.

How like you to be kind, Seeking to reassure.

And, yes, how like my mind To make itself secure.

She rolled over in the bed and reached out to touch him, but her fingers grasped at thin air and she let her arm drop to the pillow with a thud.  She loved that fraction of a second, when she would wake and reach out to touch him, thinking he was still there.   Bliss.  She closed her eyes again and prayed the fraction of a second would repeat itself.  But it did not.  She remembered.

She got out of bed and made her way through the empty rooms of the house.  Her presence, haunting each of them alongside the ghosts that haunted her disturbed mind.  At length, she reached her destination.  She stopped at the door and watched her breath catch in the cold air in front of her.  It made the candle held aloft in her hand flicker, casting monstrous shadows on the wooden panelled walls.

Upon opening the door, a gust of cold air hit her, blowing out the candle, leaving her in almost complete darkness.  She moved towards her only source of light, the window.   Suddenly she was bathed in the pale moonlight, which made her already pale complexion as white as snow.  She stood there, looking out into the abyss for longer than she knew.  Eventually she drew up the courage, and made her way around the room lighting candles as she went.  She then approached the fireplace and stoked the now dying embers in the grate.  She turned them over with a poker and eventually the fire re-kindled.

She slumped into a chaise longue and tried to make herself comfortable, feeling as if the eyes belonging to the people portrayed in the paintings around the room were following her.  She twisted and turned in the chair but it was no use.  Then it hit her.  She knew where she could sit comfortably.  She slid from the chaise longue and onto the floor in front of the fire.

The last time she had sat here, it hadn't been her own arm wrapped around her, keeping out the cold, but his.  He had run his fingers through her hair and kissed her neck.  She longed for those times, times when she had been completely at peace with the world.  Sitting there, not a voice had been heard, because they both knew what the other was thinking at that precise moment in time.

He had been her love, her life, her world and now he had been taken from her.   In the first few days of his absence, she had been unable to cry for him.  But now, as she sat staring into the fire, the tears cascaded down her face, hitting the wooden floor, like paint on a canvas.  Why had he been taken, why did it have to be him?  Now, more than ever all she wanted was to be with him.  In her head she imagined herself with him, walking in the long grass, holding hands, the sun beating down on them.  She imagined lying on the grassy banks of the river, in the shade of an old oak tree, with him beside her.  He was twirling her long hair around his fingers and he fed her grapes.

She was brought back to earth by a sharp slam. A gust of wind had blown the door closed.  She jumped and turned back to the fire and watched the embers in the grate die along with her hope and happiness.

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When the carriage trundling down the crooked road towards the house was first visible from an upstairs window, Amorette grabbed her shawl to wrap around her and ran through the house.  She paid no heed to the calls of the household staff behind her and kept moving until she reached the lower floor and threw open the doors.  The gravel crunched under her feet as she continued to run, only slowing her pace a little when the carriage door opened and Claude stepped out.  Amorette threw herself into her friend's arms, trying her hardest not to sob her heart out on Claude's shoulder.