I am abysmally sorry for leaving it so long. I hope you can forgive me! Real life just seems to be battering my plot bunny round the head with a heavy shovel at the minute. But now I'm on Study Leave so instead of revising I'm writing. Yup, I'm gonna pass my A levels!
Viva La Regina
The King is dead; long live the Queen.
The old mantra rang in her head.
Her King was dead. So what was she to do?
Live, of course.
But living was so hard without him. At the end of the day she crept into a lonely bed, so huge without him. She nuzzled into his side of the bed, clutching at his pillow in her dreams, hoping against hope to feel a warm hard shoulder beneath her head.
But there was only a pillow.
Cloth and feathers.
Not Blaise.
Little Blaise had been moved back into his Moses basket and slept at the foot of her bed. A few doors down, the twirling mobile smiled down on an empty cot as Carolina, night after night, dragged herself from sleep to quiet his cries within her own room.
"Hush now, Bambino. Mama's here."
He cried less now. Sometimes he would get that wild look again, and his little head would swivel left and right, searching for someone he didn't remember. His eyes would grow wide in panic and confusion as his little brain tried to recall who he was looking for. And then he would find Carolina and silently beseech her to tell him what it was he needed. And she would lift him up and sway around the room, murmuring nonsense to soothe him.
But even that was rare.
When you want something specific, but don't know what it is, eventually you stop wanting it so much. Who could expect an infant to remember his dead Father?
Yet still Carolina swayed and murmured and pointed to the picture over the mantelpiece.
"That's your Daddy, Bambino. That's your Daddy. He loved us very much. You won't forget him will you, bello mia?"
Little Blaise's sleepy eyes would blink at her one more time before he sank into the colourful world of baby dreams.
"Of course you'll forget him." Carolina would close her own eyes, dry despite the pain that seeped through her with the realisation. "Of course you will."
And her eyes remained dry.
Blaise hated to see her unhappy, hated to see her cry. So she didn't cry.
She lived.
She worked.
She mothered.
And, when the time was right,
She remarried.
The King is dead; viva la Regina.
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