but my son’s back-chat written upon the leaves. There is not a writer in England that must endure such troublesome meddling . . . there is not!
‘Mama,’ my son finally said, ‘You wish your readers to know that after Miss July’s baby had been cruelly seized from her by Robert and Caroline Goodwin and taken to England, that she then went on to manage a shop within the town entirely untroubled, and there grew old making first, preserves and pickles, before becoming the mistress of a lodging house?’
‘Old and happy, yes,’ I told him.
‘Then, mama,’ and here he did grin upon me—not with kindness but crafty, like he would soon prick me with reason, as he said, ‘Then can you perhaps tell me who was that woman—that half-starved woman—with the stolen chicken under her clothes?’
I had always prayed that my son would never speak of her again. Bewildered by the insolence of this plain chat, I could do nothing but stare wordlessly upon him, while he silently watched me. And we may have stayed within that sullen muteness for another three pages if it was not for Miss Louise. For she did suddenly run in upon the garden, screaming like a flogged runaway, ‘Papa, tell her . . . Papa tell her she must not . . . Papa, tell her,’ while Miss Corinne chased after her waving a large, hairy-brown, flapping moth within her hand.
One of us, my son or me, did have to warn those two girls sternly that if their skirts got ripped within this horseplay they would have to stitch them themselves. One of us did have to scold them to keep their Sunday petticoats from out the dirt. But I will let my readers guess which of us, my son or me, was finally impelled to break that terrible silence.
So I am at my desk, resting my elbow upon a short pile of ‘superfine white wove’ paper that my son did eventually remember to supply. My pen—loaded and dripping with ink—is poised above these empty sheets, ready once more to seek out July. My lamp has been trimmed and is no longer smoking. And my tea has been poured. As long as the wind does not disturb me with its howling—for my jalousie does permit any breeze to screech through it as if it be a reed pipe—I will here endeavour to yet again write the final chapter of my tale. But let me first begin by informing my reader that, where you will hear of one fowl flapping within the next part of this tale, your storyteller must share with you a secret—it was, in-matter-of-fact, two stolen fowls. And you may take my word upon it.
CHAPTER 35
THE JUDGE, PINK OF face and quite sagging with perspiration, had been wiping his sweating brow with a once cooling, but now warm damp cloth for several snatched minutes. The courthouse within the town was so hot upon that day that one of his men of law, fresh from England and dressed entirely in the thick black of justice, had slipped from his chair to collapse in a faint upon the floor to be roused with the splashing of water and the fanning of legal documents. When this judge finally looked up to find our July standing within the dock waiting for her ‘larceny of a domestic hen’ to be announced, he slowly leaned over to the clerk beside him and said in a loud whisper, ‘Is that a woman?’
For this judge believed he was gazing upon no more than a pillar of foul rags. Come, if he had been near enough to whiff the stench of her or close enough to mark the flies that girded her to feed upon her filth, he may have declared her simply shit walking.
Reader, you may recognise a sunlit courthouse room with its pale-blue walls studded with earnest plaques and flags, its wooden panels, benches and tables, bewigged white men in black and important jurors sitting stiffly to attention, but you do not know the July that stands before them in this stifling room. For we have travelled fast to be within this courtroom—perhaps thirty years has passed, or maybe more, since last we met July.
So, please forget the young woman with neat braided hair always wrapped within a clean coloured kerchief. Think not of her mouth with its mischievous turn at the corners where a wry tale or tall-tall truth looked always about to escape it. And do not search