So Many Partings [antikvár]

Prologue The small boy touched the lips of the man in the rosewood coffin. He knelt reverently beside the waking table and brushed the dead man's auburn hair back from his waxen cheek. "Don't be dead, Da," he whispered softly. "I don't know what to do without you." There was no answer in the silent and forbidding room. "I love you, I'll always love you." Resignedly, the eight-year-old nestled his body in against the mahogany coffin rail, and settled to his vigil with a sigh of resolute devotion. Thin tapers danced shadows on the paneled walls and flickered leaping shapes upon the Adamesque ceiling twenty-five feet above. Outside the stately leaded windows the December wind howled angrily, and far above, it shook the chimney pots. "I heard the Banshee call last night, Da," the boy whispered conspiratorially to the corpse. "She came to my window in the night, you know the way she does. She shrieked and wailed so I'd know someone was to die, but I didn't know you'd be the one to go. You seemed to be forever—so big and strong you were." The child tenderly patted the lifeless hand, three times the size of his own. "You feel terrible cold, Da. I wish you didn't feel so cold." The boy struggled out of his homespun woolen jacket and laid it gently on his father's body, then settled back into his accustomed place, hugging himself to keep warm in the icy dark. "The house is as much yours as it is theirs, son," his father had said proprietarily in other days, and the child had nodded gracious assent, feeling a curious lump in his throat at the knowledge that because of his illegitimacy he was not even permitted inside his own house. He looked around him now in the firelit gloom and tried to pick out the particulars his father had described—the plaster rabbit with the curled ear that had chipped off due to the mischievous efforts of a Hartington child a generation past; the satinwood walls made with wood imported from the Continent, the intricate parquetry of the floor beams, polished to a high gleam by generations of servants. Even in the midst of his sorrow he had a visceral sense of belonging.