Emma Field Book I - coming of age in the changing times of the mid-19th century

Chapter XXVIII- Waking Up

Emma felt as though she were falling off an eternal cliff, drifting down through questions as thin as wisps of cloud. She twisted and turned, trying to find a safe and soft place to land, but she only became more entangled.

"Ahhhhhhh!!!" she screamed, kneeling in the big bed, an unfamiliar nightdress twisted around her. She looked about the room in raw terror. Golden sunlight streamed in the two windows. Flames snapped in the fireplace on the far side of the room. Slowly Emma sank to the feather mattress, curling up like a fiddlehead.

The door opened softly. Someone moved silently across to the bed. A hand gently stroked her tangled hair. The someone was Elizabeth Bowerman.

Reality returning to her abruptly, Emma buried her face in the pillow and sobbed. She felt Elizabeth's forehead against the back of her own head. She felt the firmness of Elizabeth's hand between her shaking shoulders.

"What happens to me now, Elizabeth Bowerman?" she said when at last she could sob no more.

"I don't know, child." The fire warmed, the forehead steadied, and the hand soothed. "I do not know. I know only this...that thy father's love is greater than death. Thee will never lose it. His soul is here with thee." Then she added more softly, "His body is at the Coopers'." Elizabeth stroked Emma's hair again. The woman shifted slightly on the bed.

"Don't leave! Oh, please don't leave me, Elizabeth! Promise me you will..." Emma broke off and clutched Elizabeth's arm.

The Quaker took Emma's face in her hands. "Just as thy father's spirit will not leave thee, neither will I."

Elizabeth stayed with Emma as she said one last goodbye to the man who had been both her father and her mother. She remained with the girl as Mr. Brown tittered about the poor judgment of some people going out in storms. She stood by as the anaemic-looking minister droned on endlessly about "God's will moving in strange ways" and "In my Father's house are many mansions: if it were not so, I would have told you. I go to prepare a place for you..." and finally "dust to dust and ashes to ashes..."

Wave after wave of sorrow swept over Emma's young body. Only the presence of one so silent and steady beside her kept her coming up for air. And so it was that Emma found herself in the castle with the golden windows. The life that she had often imagined for herself within these walls was grand. The life she found, though just for a while, was safe.

The pain, so jagged and rough at first, gave way to a flaccid, gaping emptiness. Just as her seven-year-old tongue had kept probing the hole left by a lost tooth, her mind kept going back to the jagged, rough spot where her father had lain in her arms.

Finally, there was only emptiness.