A tendril of chill wind blew down the chimney, and collapsed the ashes in the fireplace with a soft whoosh. An early October frost crystallised the windows, and at nine-o-clock, the sky was completely dark, fronds of cloud streaked across the moon and stars. The room, too, was dim and sparsely furnished.

An old woman, all bones and wrinkled skin, with gnarled hands like tree roots, and a young man, wrapped in a thick wool blanket, sat before the grate. A smokey oil lamp on the table now provided the only illumination, and it flickered as a draft blew in under the door.

The boy shivered, pulling the blanket more closely about his skinny shoulders, and continued to nibble on a sticky bar of chocolate.

The old woman spoke, as small and precise as a pocket watch;

"Are you enjoying your birthday present, dear boy?"

He nodded, and replied, with a slight shiver; "Yes, thank you, aunt."

"And you have had a nice day, away from your studies?"

"Yes, I have. Thank you, it has been enjoyable," he was unfailingly polite, as he had been taught, but tinged with curiosity. Why was he being kept back from bed so late? His brother and cousin would already be asleep by now, cocooned under heavy blankets against the cold.

"Your bother is not yet old enough, but I know you have both started to wonder, now that you are reaching manhood yourself, about your father."

The boy's heart quickened, and he leaned forward to catch every word the woman he called his aunt uttered.

"I must be perfectly honest with you, my boy; I did not like your father. I did not like him one bit!

When he showed up on our doorstep, cold and starved, I would have turned him away. I know it sounds heartless, but I knew that no good man would be out wandering on a night like that. Beatrice, bless her heart, took pity on him, and welcomed him indoors. Sat him by the fire and gave him hot broth to eat, waited on him as though he were a king. A king, mind you! Not a vagabond!"

She shook her head, and looked at the curious boy with a modicum of tenderness.

"She was such a good girl, your mother. I said she had a heart of gold. But she was not clever, or worldly. All that she ever dreamed of was to marry, to keep her own house, and to raise children. When her father - your grandfather - went away to the first desert war, along with my husband, I took her in, and she made my chaotic house bright and homely. She would sing to herself while she peeled potatoes and scrubbed the floors and spun the wool. She took delight in the most insignificant things…"

Her voice trailed off, until she recognised her own sentimentality, and reigned it in.

"That man took advantage of her goodness. He stayed for months, and treated her like his slave. It was much the same after he returned from his wandering. By that point, she was heavy with child - you - and urged him to marry her, so that she might keep her standing in the community. Well, he did so, but he was not happy about it. He lasted barely five years in our household, during which time he was indolent and unfriendly. He rarely joined us for meals, preferring instead to remain in the cellar with his books. Those books are yours, by right, although I cannot see what use you might have for them."

She looked at the cellar door, in the corner of the kitchen, with distaste.

"He frequently ignored his bride, or ordered her to cook for him at all hours of the day or night. He made her do humiliating things for his pleasure, and he had no compassion for her delicate state. It is a miracle that your brother survived to be born! Then, as abruptly as he had come, he disappeared again."

The boy's attention was fixed on her story. It had reached the stage that he could almost remember, when he closed his eyes and concentrated hard. His mother, bewildered and heartbroken, walking for miles and miles, with one son in her arms, the other tripping by her side, looking frantically for her man.

"Well, she had never been strong. The loss of him really was the end of her. She ceased to eat, or to drink water, or to wash herself. She…. she blamed herself. She would ask me what she could have done differently, done better, to have made him stay. I told her truly that no wife could have done better, could have been more attentive or kindly. She cried. Then my Jakob died on the front line, and with him my dear daughter-in-law Lydia. My attention wandered from Bea, while I piloted my granddaughter through the rocks of orphanage, and by the time I looked back, Bea was close to death."

The boy remembered this part well, however he tried not to. The faded pieces of his mother, trying to rise from the floor, her limbs twitching with pain and urgency.

"She wanted me to take care of you and your brother. Not that I would ever have turned you away, even raising an orphaned granddaughter as I was. But she was particularly insistent that no harm should come to you boys. I never met a woman so sentimental about her children."

She shook her head, half-disapproving, half-disbelieving.

"It is up to you what you do with this information. Your father has never returned; he may be alive, or he may be dead. You may have your father's books and writings, for all the good it will do you." He was silent for a long moment, as this new insight to his origins and early life slotted into place, before he remembered his manners.

"Thank you, aunt," he said, "I… I want to read the books, please. And I want to tell Al everything you've told me. We have never had any secrets, and I don't wish to start now."

She shrugged, and mimed dusting her hands; "On your head be it. Now, go to bed."

He nodded, and took the stairs two at a time, bursting to tell his brother what he had heard.