The Laughing Children.

[quigonejinn]

At one moment he sat gorged and bloated with food at a trestle table, at another he was skipping madly over the courtyard cobbles between two buxom maidens, hand in hand with them and laughing unrestrainedly. There were laughing children everywhere.

One of your first memories is of a room, wide and low, dark at both ends. Many of your early memories take place in this room, in fact, but this memory is distinguished with the degree of silence and the hour. The floor is stone, and there is a low fire in the hearth beside you. A woman stands at your right, and a man is in front of you. Your feet are hot, and the woman's hand is rough even through the fabric of your smock and even though she is touching you gently.

Now that you return to this memory, you are quite sure that the room must have been a kitchen. The woman with her hand on you is Fat Jeanne, the cook, and the man in front of you must be Brown, come to see if she is still willing to go to England with him.

At the time the memory occurred, you could not quite catch all the words. You were old enough to understand simple phrases, simple talking, but they were speaking quickly and with great emotion. From the later facts of the matter, you have been able to deduce that fat Jeanne was, in fact, unwilling to go to England with her husband. The cook's position was being held open for her, but she had changed her mind. She did not want to live in France; after recent events, it agitated her to even think about leaving Gracay again. She would not go anywhere.

And at that point in the conversation, the man gestured to you. He asked a question, looked at Jeanne hard, and Jeanne suddenly gripped your shoulder so hard that you were tempted to cry out with pain.

Fat Jeanne was not your mother, and Brown was not your father.

...

The first knowledge that you had of the boy's existence was the letter that the Comte wrote to you: the fine, thin handwriting of the Ancien Regime, giving his greetings and his respects, his hopes that you were settling well into Smallbridge. Later, after speaking briefly of how much he missed Marie, he included was a paragraph on the boy.

Captain Bush -- then Lieutenant -- had spent a winter at Gracay some years ago, and it had been sufficient time to leave a boy. The Comte was sorry that he did not tell you of the child's existence while you were still in France, but he had not known the parentage of the child, as the child's mother had only recently died. The Comte would be happy to keep the boy in the household, but it was possible that the child might be happier in the country of his father, with his father's dearest friend or any other family that Captain Bush had left. It would be easy for Brown to bring the child with him on his return to England.

For a long, insane moment, you could not think at all. Then, for another long, insane moment, you thought of telling the Comte to keep the boy. You had nothing to offer him in England.

You were in your study at Smallbridge. There were rugs on the floor, shelves and shelves of books. Two chairs were arranged by the fireplace, which had not been lit due to the heat of the summer, and above the fireplace, there was a round, Naval mirror that showed the room in its convex surface. The reflection called to mind the room at the Comte's where you had played whist with the Comte and Marie and Bush, and you could not -- it made something inside you twist to imagine a small boy sitting in Bush's seat by the fire, and yet, you could imagine, with great detail and vividness, what he would look like.

After another moment, you took a quill and a fresh sheet of paper.

Bush had left a few sisters in Chichester, you wrote. You would be happy to contact them and see if they were interested, but you would also be happy to raise your friend's child at Smallbridge.

...

So no, you do not remember your mother, nor do you remember very much of the Comte. Gracay is a blur in your memory. Mostly, you remember Jeanne, who had taken care of you while your mother worked and after she died, and Brown, the man who stood across from you that night. There are muddled memories of the kitchen, of saying goodbye to the maids, of the wagonride away from Gracay. There was a special breakfast roll with currants in it, as well as an entire bowl of milk. You were four years old and did not entirely understand the concept of going away.

The shore stands out clearly in your memory, though. You had never been to the ocean before; you had not even known that it existed, and Brown taught you the word for it as the two of you were being rowed out to the ship. The water smelled strange; the sky was strangely colored, and white birds came down low over your head. Wind blew steadily from one direction, and the stones underfoot were a different color that the ones in either the kitchen or the courtyard. You stood by Brown's side on the quay; he handed you to the ferryman, like a package, and you had a sudden flare of anxiety when you looked up and saw that he was still standing on the quay.

You reached out and shouted for him.

He swung down eventually, though independent of whatever it was that you said to him, and when a storm came over the water, after he had gone and done his duty on the deck, he came back under and sat with you. Water poured from his shoulders and his face; you could hear thunder outside, and the ship swayed so that everything hung sideways before rolling back the other way.

"Are you frightened?" he said, in French, as he took off his hat.

You shook your head.

"Do you feel sick?" He took off his coat.

It was quite dark in the berth, as the lights had been extinguished at the first start of the storm, but it had not occurred to you that you ought to feel ill. When you told him this, he looked at you quite soberly, said something about that being right, seeing as you were the son of your father, and then he reached down into a saddlebag so that the two of you could make a dinner out of the last of Jeanne's currant rolls. Later, he talked to you a little about the parts of the ship that the two of you could see, and it wasn't until years later that you realized those ship's terms -- bulkhead, aft, port, frigate, rigger -- were in English, not French.

You have no memory of your father. You have little memory of the Comte. For years, Brown and that small Channel ferry in the middle of a storm were all the knowledge you had of fatherhood. While he slept in the hammock, you watched the rise and fall of his chest, and you practiced the naming of ship parts and kinds.

...

On meeting the boy for the first time, there is, in fact, something like recognition. First, you realize that you have, in fact, seen him before. On sighting the face, you realize that you saw him at the fringe of Brown's wedding festivities. He was with a young woman, most likely his mother, and he also ran around with the other children. It was far different from the solemn child in front of you now, and you remember hearing that woman cough on the march out of Gracay afterwards. You have no specific memory of anything to do with her after that; if the child is with you now, she must have subsequently died.

Second, there are the eyes, blue as anything in the calm face. A single Channel crossing, and he already has a little of the rolling sea gait, such that he stumbles a little when following Brown into your study. The weather must have been clear for the last afternoon because he is burned across the nose and at the chin. His hands are already starting to darken.

Brown makes the introductions; the boy is a little shy and struggles to stand still, but above all, it is so strange to hear fluent French out of the mouth of a child who looks so much like your old, dead friend.

...

On the[Kid: the loneliness. The distance from Richard Arthur, even though they share lessons. creeping down to the kitchen, looking for fat Jeanne, finding only Brown brooding by the fire. Him patting the boy, but telling the boy that he ought to learn English now]

...

[Hornblower: unable to sleep, so goes to study to pace so as not to wake Barbara. Sees Brown carrying the boy back to the boy's room. It's some months later. Sleepwalking.]

...

[Kid: more on the distance between him and Richard Arthur, the distance between him and Hornblower, between him and Barbara. Distance being the primary defining factor in his life. ]

...

[Hornblower: receiving letters from Richard Arthur and from Kid. Use to illustrate conflict in his heart -- it's not like loving both Horatio and Maria. Almost have to choose which one to love, and it is easier to love Richard Arthur, who is bright and cheerful, and not the child who looks so much like Bush but acts so little like him. Kid is close enough so that they have him home for Sunday supper.]

...

[Kid: home, no supper one afternoon, but instead walk with HH. Fight with Barbara, and they end up rambling over onto a hill, looking and seeing the ocean. Silence, birds swooping around. And HH asking the boy what he knows about the sea. And the boy not knowing all that much. Boy is struggling in school.]

...

[Hornblower: with the boy, in his study, the boy reading the letters of the sea aloud, and Hornblower with Richard Arthur's letters in his lap. The excitement for the sea. The love of the sea.]

...

[Kid: Birthday present of the sailing boat, lessons with Brown, who is happier now that Jeanne has come over. No children, and the happiness of that.]

...

[Hornblower: happiness! But setup for the ending.]

...

[discussion of little Horatio and Maria]

...

Ten, physical description of sailing, of water, of drowning]

...

[Hornblower: grief. The father died in a river in France; the son made closer to England and died in the Channel. You arrived entirely, have lived in the country of your birth and wartime allegience for over a dozen years, and now, inside your chest, your heart feels as though it, too, is dead.]