I Already Know Thy Grief

"Praising what is lost makes the remembrance dear."

March 2nd

After reading it a final time, Benedick tucked the page of his mother's journal back under his mattress. He had studied the page countless times since he stole it from the journal his mother left lying open the night she died. Every year, he spent hours on the anniversary of her death staring at the paper, begging it to tell him more. He hoped time would reveal something his younger self hadn't seen, some hint as to what really happened to his mother.

What he knew was limited. If he hadn't eavesdropped on his father and grandfather interrogating the servants, Benedick would have known even less. His mother, after putting both her children to bed, had sat down to writing until the servants started to extinguish the lights and fires for the night. Near that time, she had gone out into the garden for an unknown reason, never to return. Her journal had still laid open the next morning, the last entry unfinished. Benedick had found it when he ran away to the library to escape the weeping and screaming. When he had heard footsteps, he had pulled the page loose and hid with it. To this day, Benedick's father didn't know a page survived. He thought he had burned all of the journals.

This year, Benedick acknowledged for the first time that the page likely didn't matter. He wasn't the best pupil, but he paid attention and absorbed as much of each lesson as he could. The Académie was improving his mind and his reasoning. This year, his mother's dreams about fire and her loved ones seemed logical rather than mystical. The summer before his mother died, there had been an lightning fire in the orchard at Illyria Park that destroyed several trees. The Capulet fire that December had killed two Capulets and, eventually, two Montagues. Ultimately, the dream made a disappointing amount of sense.

Still, he would treasure the paper. This was his last reminder of his mother. It was the last time their lives had intersected, her writing his initial on the page. After stealing it, the page had stayed with him always. It comforted him when he wasn't allowed to see her body or attend her funeral and burial. His mother had disappeared into the ether after she said good night. This part of her would always remain.

A sudden knock on the door set Benedick on edge. Although he didn't have the largest array of friends at the Académie, he had enough that he had already been asked twice to join an expedition to a tavern. There were scant few places Benedick wanted to be less than a tavern while he was contemplating his mother. "I'm not going out!"

"Open the damn door! I'm like a bloody savage shouting out here!"

Benedick quickly straightened the covers on his bed. Henry Nowell was painfully observant. Benedick didn't want him to observe that he was hiding anything under his mattress. "Just a minute!" But Benedick had barely reached the door before Henry shook the lock loose and opened it for himself.

"Hiding in here, are we?"

Benedick found Henry and his purple tunic intimidating. Henry was a young man who knew he was a king - confident, gregarious, and talented. Benedick, although he was aware that he was Henry's social equal, felt absolutely pathetic next to him. This might have been bad enough, but their colored tunics came at a price. The deans had instated a inter-house mentoring program in return for lifting the ban on tunics in house colors. Henry was Benedick's mentor. That purple tunic heralded unrelenting study sessions in every subject but mathematics and outings in which Benedick felt like a burden. "I'm just having a quiet night."

"Oh, are you? You aren't staying behind to have it out with Hal Capulet again?"

Benedick frowned. "I didn't start the fight, and anyway, he is a smirking, smug son of a bitch. Someone has to put him in his place!"

"Your families have hated each other for centuries. You couldn't have waited a few months? I barely had a foot in the door coming back from my brother's funeral before they called me in to account for a fight I wasn't here to enjoy! But at least I was assured they were all very sorry they couldn't set aside their own months-old rules for me." Henry rolled his eyes at the memory of the simpering deans.

"I'm sorry I caused trouble for you," Benedick said. "I thought they would let you off, considering." That was a lie. He hadn't given Henry a second thought. Bloodying up Hal Capulet had made Benedick feel great, even with the sea of bruises that still smarted over his own gut. "I'm also sorry about your brother, by the way."

"Thanks." Henry's gratitude for condolences was threadbare after so much use in the previous weeks, but his expression was sincere. He valued a simple condolence that fit someone's personality more than a false spectacle. "But I didn't come here to talk about that."

"Then why did you?" he asked, irritated.

"I have a dead mother and you have a dead mother. What are we going to do about it?"

"Do? There isn't anything to do! And what the hell do you know about my mother?"

"Only what your sister told me. When your family's turn came in the mourning pageant for Sebastian, she said she was worried about you. I promised her I would keep company with you." Henry smiled to himself while he watched Benedick try to digest that information. For his own part, he had been happy to indulge Lady Beatrice's forwardness. Something other than consolation had been a delight to his spirit at the time. It didn't hurt that the lady was something of a delight on her own either, even if Henry wasn't near making any decisions yet. There was never any harm in doing a lady a favor. "How old were you when your mother died?"

Benedick hesitated to answer. It felt unmanly to give in to his sister's scheme, allowing an outsider into darkest day on the premise that he needed minding. If Beatrice had come herself or if one of his cousins had come, that would be different. He knew they could understand. On the other hand, none of the prior seven years under this rule had made his day any better, and Henry didn't seem to have any self-doubts over the topic. "Ten. You?"

"Three." Henry hardly had to look at Benedick to see the discomfort. He had found that youth made the 'champion' in a dead parent conversation. "There's a portrait of her holding me when I was an infant. That's how I remember her; in my memory, she's just a mothering haze. You must have better memories."

"I do," Benedick confessed. After Henry put his his mother out into the conversation, Benedick suddenly felt safe to do the same. "She was with us a part of almost every day. I wondered a lot why she and my father never had more children, because I think she enjoyed being a mother. Sometimes I wonder if these days would be easier if she hadn't."

"Maybe for a heartless bastard but not any sort of a man. I was barely old enough to remember mine when she died, much less anything else, but every year I think..." Henry's bright eyes stood out against his darkening expression. "Every year, I waste a few minutes thinking that she and my sister would be alive if I had done the right thing. If I had died like a good son would have, my mother and baby sister would never have come down with my fever. I didn't have to know them to feel that way. Neither would you, if your mother had been a stranger to you."

"But you..." Benedick protested, his words trailing off into uncertainty. He regrouped. "You have made peace with it. I haven't." How can I, when I don't know who took her away?

"My father has had more than any man's fair share of death. One year, he told me that a man has to accept that certain occurrences will change his life. The days before and the days after will never be identical. It's no dishonor to who and what you lost to live your life. The dishonor is wasting what you still have when the time has passed for mourning." Anxious to push the conversation toward another end, Henry asked if Benedick had anything to drink.

"No," he replied much too quickly.

"Rubbish." The rules forbade students to keep private alcohol stores; nearly everyone did, especially the four who were enjoying their house's private room. "I'm not about to turn you in, you know, not when I would share your punishment. Go on, get it out." Henry soon had a drink in hand - a very decent one at that, he noticed by the smell. "A toast," he proposed, "to our mothers, ladies gone too soon - but to a realm that better deserves them."

In all his pondering, Benedick had never thought of his mother's death that way. It was a beautiful thought. This world, one that had let her be treated so poorly in the end, didn't deserve her. Where she was, his mother was eternally safe and happy. "Our mothers - and that we see them again someday."

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