He stayed up long into night, simply watching them sleep. Nursing a tall glass of brandy as the hours counted down. Fatigue pulled at him, but he would not be swayed. He'd slept long enough. Lost enough. Ram Dass and his host seemed to understand as much because after the girls had been bathed and whisked into warm robes by the housekeeper, they left them to his charge. And like a sentry on watch at the front lines, he remained vigilant and unrelenting.
The storm had passed, giving way to that fleeting freshness that so often follows a brisk American rain. Smelling of clay and living things – rich with possibility – teeming and quietly busy. He couldn't deny that he breathed it in with relish. Savoring it. Thankful. Blessed. All too aware of the second chance he'd been given while so many young lives had been cut short.
Magic has to be believed, that is the only way it is real.
The candlelight flickered, making his sensitive eyes water. But he kept them firm on the form of his daughter regardless – like a bayonet to a rifle – stuck fast and unapologetically sharp. She and Becky slept soundly now, peacefully, small fingers entwined over the coverlet. As if at loathe to be parted for even an instant. Like the brothers in arms he made on the battlefield, they too had bonded through adversity.
It was a feeling he understood well. Admittedly, he had little wish to look away, even for an instant. After everything that had happened, he was convinced that a singular second would be too long. Rational mind refusing to give up the notion that the moment he closed his eyes, the moment he even blinked, he would somehow forget. That he would wake up in his bedroom upstairs, Ram Dass singing softly by the window, only to find it all a dream. Or worse, find himself back on the coarse grit of the battlefield, ankle deep in gore and fetid mud. Struggling to remember the sound of her laugh or the softness of her hair as enemy planes roared overhead, misting the trenches with thick yellow poison.
He believed that even when age and infirmity took the remembrance of the unearthly screams and sirens from him, he would always remember the gas. The way it had choked him. Coating his tongue, his lungs, his heart. Drowning him from the inside out. Suffocating and-
He closed his eyes. Hating himself for it immediately as his reached out blindly, hand curling gently around the shape of his daughter's foot under the blanket. Crushing it gently, like an anchor. The relief was not immediate, but it came quicker than it had in the hospital and later with Ram Dass in the lighted depths of the Randall home. He breathed deeply, hesitant, like one gasp too far might bring back the acidic burn of the gas. The smell of petrol, vomit and rot.
She was his living heart.
His soul walking.
The closest thing to heaven on earth.
And he'd almost lost her.
Anger - trapped in its rawest, most primordial form - rippled through him still. For what his daughter had not told him, Becky filled in without embellishment. Giving a solid, if not admittedly biased, account of the months that had passed since he'd mistakenly been declared dead and the government had seized his assets. For unlike his own flesh and blood, who didn't understand why one person would willingly harm another merely out of spite and jealousy, Becky had suffered the same first hand - likely since she'd been able to walk. He listened to her silently, coaxing her favor gradually through the night until she trusted him enough to curl up at his side. Touch-starved and quivering. He didn't know how many times he would have to say it for her to believe it, but he had already summoned his lawyer. Her trials were over now. He would see the girl warded into his care. Promising to do his best to make up for the childhood she was denied. A second daughter, in every way that mattered.
Was there no mercy in this world? And if there was, why was it that the innocents were the ones that always suffered? Surely God did not intend for such madness? He had seen enough of mankind's cruelty. Enough of its efferent desire to fight one another. More than he cared to remember. And growingly less of any sign of an all knowing, all loving deity. After all, how could a God that called itself their father let their children go so far astray?
His lips firmed over the hard line of his teeth when Miss. Minchin's face flashed in his mind's eye. She had recognized him. He was sure of that. After all, how could she not? In that moment in the office, before she'd proclaimed Sara parentless and alone. She had willingly condemned her to prison, the streets, or – god forbid – worse. And for what? Ignorance and petty hate? Whose origins he knew not.
She had almost cost him everything!
He did not think himself a cruel man. But for the injustice his daughter had suffered, for what she had tried to do to them both, he would not be swayed. He would pursue every recourse to ensure such a villainous soul could not harm another.
Certainly she had no business being around children!
But then, who else would run the school? Becky and Sara had relished the story when they'd giggled over a plate of sugared pears. Telling him how the Headmistress's own sister had escaped through one of the windows in the dead of night. Dashing way to embark on a passionate affair with the milkman of all people.
He swirled the amber liquid in his glass thoughtfully before a remarkably boyish grin lit up the corners of his tired eyes - a precocious idea taking shape. His smile only grew wider as the emotion settled into stay. Recalling all the times he had seen the man observing the antics of the children from his parlor window. Taking comfort in their happy laughter and constant chatter. Even on his worst days, when he missed his son the sharpest, their antics never failed to draw his interest.
Perhaps he would talk to Randall in the morning, see what the old coot had to say about it.
Reference:*"Wind up" was World War I slang for a comrade that was frightened or on the verge of a breakdown
