by Ross Turner
“And secondly…” The old man continued. “I remember that Arthur could do anything, for anybody…”
The young boy’s brow furrowed then and his expression asked the question on his tongue without even needing to speak.
“It was the same for as long as I knew him…” The old Vicar continued, as if that explained everything. “Riverbrook needed a leader, a figurehead: he took on the responsibility without second thought. The village needed a school: he built one. When he needed to be a father and a husband, he was wonderful. Your mother adored him so…”
“I’m sure she still does…” Johnathan replied then, recalling the desperate hope in her mother’s eyes when she had mistaken him for his father, both when Johnathan had stopped Richard from beating her, and then also when Johnathan had saved her from the flames that Richard had set to consume her.
“Of that I have no doubt.” Father Peter agreed. “It was not the sort of bond to be so easily forgotten.
Johnathan sighed then. So many things had happened. And not just recently, but over the years, he imagined, there were so many things that he didn’t even know about.
“Try not to dwell on it too much, Johnathan.” Father Peter advised gently. “I know things are not at their best, but none of it’s your doing. You’ve done nothing but good.” He laughed shortly then at his own words. “Funnily enough, you remind me of your father. He would be very proud of you.”
Johnathan smiled at that, for strangely enough he found much comfort in that particular comment, as if for years that was all he’d ever really wanted to hear.
Father Peter could see the impact of what he’d said, and he smiled reassuringly. Then, after a few more moments, his expression became more serious, and he spoke again to the young boy.
“Johnathan…” He began, his tone dropping slightly. “Have you been speaking to your father?” He asked. “Is there a way you contact him?”
Of course, at face value, what the old Vicar was asking was absurd. He was asking a twelve-year-old boy if he could communicate with the dead. Yet, in all his life, he had never asked a question of anybody with so much hope hanging on his words.
He had always in years gone by been able to turn to Arthur Knight, safe in the knowledge that he, above all others, would know exactly what to do. And now, seemingly, even after all these years, even though Arthur was dead, here the old Vicar was, crazily still hoping for the same thing.
Johnathan struggled for words for a minute or so, and the Vicar awaited his response, perhaps inwardly not quite as patiently as he should have done, but he did his best not to let it show.
“It’s complicated.” Johnathan finally admitted, sighing heavily. “He’s not always there, and I’m sure sometimes he’s there and I don’t even know it…”
“When is he there?” Father Peter asked.
Johnathan thought for a moment more, considering that.
“Whenever I need him.” Johnathan admitted again, though this time a slight smile touched his lips.
He hadn’t thought of it in that way before.
“So, when you need him…” The old man continued, considering carefully the way he phrased his question. “How do you speak to him…? How does he come to you…?”
The young boy looked up for a moment. The answer to that one was much easier, but made him sound no less insane, certainly. He felt he could tell Father Peter though. If there was anybody in the world he could tell that wasn’t his sister, it would have been the old Vicar.
Johnathan sighed.
“It’s gone now…” He started. “After the fire…There was an old mirror in my bedroom. It used to belong to my grandfather…”
The Vicar’s face was awash with intrigue and sudden understanding, but there still lingered traces of slight confusion in his expression.
“So can’t you speak to him now?” The old man asked, unsure exactly what Johnathan was trying to say.
“I don’t know…” He confessed, sighing yet again.
The old man smiled reassuringly.
“Don’t worry.” He said then, placing his hand on the back of Johnathan’s hand, the only part of him that wasn’t bandaged. “Arthur will find a way, and if he can’t, I know you will.”
The young boy looked at Father Peter then with eyes full of curiosity and intrigue. The old Vicar seemed to have more faith in him than he did in himself. Though somehow he perceived that was usually the way, and indeed the reason why anybody ever failed at anything in the first place.
Seeing Johnathan’s realisation, Father Peter smiled. On first thought, what he was asking of Johnathan seemed to be impossible, insane, and ridiculous even.
But of late, the line that he had believed lay between the possible and the impossible, had become somewhat blurred and twisted, until now he wasn’t entirely sure if it even still existed.
The young boy sat before him processed what the Vicar had asked of him, and Father Peter watched in awe as Johnathan’s expression flickered through emotions like water skims over rock.
First he looked confused and lost, then he set deep into thought and concentration, and finally that thoughtful gaze was eventually replaced by a determination painted so obviously across Johnathan’s face that it may as well have been Arthur sitting before him.
Like father, like son.
That look told Father Peter then that, if this young Knight had anything to do with it, nothing was impossible.
Suddenly, light flooded the hall as the sun broke the horizon, far off to the east, and its golden rays were warm and comforting upon Johnathan’s face as they streamed in through the stained glass windows set high above.
Johnathan looked up and examined the varying scenes that the shining windows depicted.
One showed an angel, hovering up above the clouds looking down upon the masses far below him with a look of sorrow and regret pained across his face. His hands looked as though they had fallen to his sides in defeat and his head bowed mournfully.
Another portrayed a great, powerful knight, clad in full armour, bearing a heavy shield that was shaped like a massive kite, and a broadsword so large that the young boy wondered how he would even have been able to lift it. Nonetheless, the knight was doing battle with a fierce beast of some kind, with fangs that searched hungrily for flesh and eyes that bore into the hero like knives.
Each coloured glass window told a different story, undoubtedly each of which could be interpreted in a thousand different ways and more.
Johnathan sighed as he glanced all around, feeling decidedly melancholy all of a sudden.
But then, as if exactly on cue, the door to the room that Johnathan had awoken in creaked slowly open, and out emerged his mother, Emily, and his dear little sister, Maddie.
“Johnathan!” Maddie cried, springing towards him, and Emily’s face was awash with great relief.
Resisting the urge right at the last moment, Maddie stopped herself short just before she threw herself on her brother to hug him. She eyed his dressings warily and even looked a little sheepish.
“How are you feeling?” She asked then, her voice a little timid, as if she had been shot down.
“Oh, Maddie.” Johnathan said then, laughing slightly. He climbed immediately to his feet, hiding his pain, and pulled her up into his arms. She hugged him back gratefully and he winced inwardly, but he didn’t care. It was far more than worth it.
Emily crossed over the pews then to him too, restraining herself from leaping with relief, though only just.
“My Johnathan…” She said quietly, her voice almost a whisper as she clasped him gently into her arms.
Holding him for a moment, suddenly everything felt like it would all be alright again.
“What were you thinking?” She asked him then. Her tone not accusing, only concerned, and he looked back at his mother’s liquid blue eyes very seriously.
“I had to get you out.” He replied simply, looking slowly between Emily and Maddie, with not a hint of anything but
love in his voice.
They simply stared back at Johnathan, knowing not what they could say. There was no way they could reprimand him. They were only upset because his actions had very nearly cost them the ultimate price.
Before either of them could respond, however, Johnathan’s expression shifted and turned back solely to his mother. Her heart fluttered and guilt surged through her veins, whether it was misplaced or not, she didn’t know.
She did, however, know exactly what he was going to ask, even before he drew breath to speak.
His expression said a thousand times more than the question forming in his mind ever could.
A single tear escaped her and streamed down her hot, flushed cheek, as her son’s eyes looked right into her very soul, into the core of her being: the very place where she hid all of her guilt and mourning and suffering, housed there, purposefully, forevermore, until the day she would eventually die and it would all be forgotten.
“I’m sorry…” Emily Knight breathed, flooding the nave suddenly with her sorrow and her grief, for they had been simmering for years, and their effect was sudden and frightful.
Chapter Fifteen
How did this happen?
Why did it happen?
How hadn’t he known?
Why hadn’t she put a stop to it!?
No one in the village would had stood for it! Richard would have been thrown out!
How in God’s name had he been allowed to get away with this for so long!?
A thousand and more questions flooded through Johnathan’s mind, and he had absolutely no way of determining which to ask, how he would ask them, or if they were even relevant.
Finally, after staring at his mother’s stricken face for almost longer than he could bear, he settled for the simplest request of all.
“Tell me.” He said quietly, his voice level and serious and far beyond that of a mere twelve-year-old.
Although, that was quite possibly because it wasn’t just him who was speaking, but at that point, that matter definitely wasn’t relevant.
“Tell me everything.”
Emily took a deep, quivering breath and glanced briefly at Father Peter, almost as if for reassurance. The old man smiled and nodded encouragingly at her. She pursed her lips and looked back to her awaiting children.
Johnathan sat upon the pews again, for standing drained his strength, and Maddie perched close by his side, her hand in his, keeping her safe.
“Alright…” Emily eventually said, exhaling deeply and summing as much courage as she could muster.
For all these years, hiding the truth had been hard, but it had become second nature to her. She had bottled up everything and shoved it down deep inside of her. Now, faced with revealing it all and exposing her every fragile nerve, she felt more afraid than ever before, and Emily’s grief threatened to overwhelm her completely as it washed over her and raced through her heart and her veins in great flooding waves.
“Your real father’s name is Arthur, Arthur Knight.”
Johnathan felt Maddie stir immediately and her little hand in his own tightened. He quieted her gently and pulled her even closer, enveloping his baby sister into his arms, holding her close, protecting her as always.
“I came to Riverbrook many years ago, almost fifteen now.” Emily began, and her voice cracked with rushing emotion as all her supressed memories came flooding back to her. “I don’t know what brought me here. All of a sudden I just felt an overwhelming desire to leave home.”
Father Peter’s expression was one of understanding and compassion, whilst Maddie was still struggling to keep herself from bursting into tears, and Johnathan’s face was entirely unreadable.
“I lived in the far south.” His mother continued. “Right by the coast. I was happy. But out of nowhere, I just up and left home. I came north, not really following any path or track in particular…”
Emily told her children of how her random wanderings had taken her far and wide, and though during that time she didn’t know what it was exactly she was looking for, in every place that she found herself, she knew inherently that she had not yet discovered it.
She told them of all the places she visited and the people she met and the wonders she saw, and that yet even still none of it had ever seemed enough.
Some of the sights that she had beheld in that time, some of the people she had grown to know and love, some of the things she had experienced, had been truly extraordinary.
Nonetheless, every time, she had always somehow subconsciously decided that this wasn’t what she was searching for, and had moved on, forever on the move, never settling in one place or another for more than a few weeks, or at the most months.
“And then eventually I reached a river. It ran west to east, blocking my way north.”
“Did you cross it?” Johnathan asked then, though not really knowing why that question had been so necessary for him to ask.
“No.” His mother admitted, smiling fondly at the memory as it flitted through her mind. “I decided to follow it west, and in the end the river started to wind its way north anyway, but I didn’t follow it all the way…”
“Why not?” Maddie asked then, piping up for the first time in quite some time.
“Because I found what I was looking for.” Her mother replied immediately, as if there was no possible other explanation.
“What did you find?” The young girl asked then, looking up almost longingly at her mother, as if this explanation was all she had ever wanted to hear.
“I found Riverbrook, or the beginnings of it anyway.” She replied simply. “But, more importantly, I found your father.”
With great energy and enthusiasm then, Emily Knight began to describe to her children the world she had accidentally, or perhaps by way of fate, she would never know, stumbled in to.
Her explanations were detailed, eloquent and elegant, as if she had been there only yesterday.
Her recollections of Arthur Knight, the first time she had met him, and indeed also seemingly every occasion following that too, were vivid and clear down to every last details, and she wove great descriptions of what he had said, how he had said it, and even the expressions on his face as he had talked.
Clearly she had loved him immediately, and completely. Aside from all else, those truths were plain to see.
And even as Emily’s memories spread to the rest of the village and its progress, always she came back to one thing: her dear Arthur Knight.
“I fell in love with him…” She continued then, though by that point there was no way either Maddie or Johnathan could possibly have missed that fact. “Soon we were wed and I fell pregnant with you, Johnathan…”
“What happened then?” Her young son asked, but even as he spoke, he knew what was would soon come, and he began to feel physically sick to his stomach.
“In time you were born. We lived in the cottage. We were very happy.”
Emily’s eyes at that point brimmed with so many memories that she was almost on the verge of tears.
“I fell pregnant again, and soon enough Maddie was born…” She recalled, though at that point her voice began to trail off, for she knew what the next part to this beautiful tale was.
So did Johnathan, and the pain he felt stabbing at his chest in that moment was like nothing he had ever experienced. It was a knife jabbing at his heart that twisted cruelly between his ribs and flushed his lungs with panic.
Somehow, instinctively, he knew that the pain he felt was not entirely his own, but that his father was also hearing Emily’s words, and they stung at him with such fierce intensity that the agony was almost unbearable.
“Then it happened.” Johnathan’s mother stated ominously, as if those three words said all that needed to be heard.
And indeed they were not the traditional three words that mean so much more than they seem to say.
“What happened?” Johnathan asked. His voice was icy cold and he could feel Maddie trembling as she pressed even c
loser to him.
“Arthur didn’t come home one day.” Emily said, taking quick, shallow breaths, as if somehow believing the less air she breathed in the less painful the words would be. “It was two days before his body was found…”
A sob escaped Emily then and her barricades crumbled and tears began to stream openly down her cheeks. Innately, Maddie too burst into tears and ran to her mother, who swept her up in a fierce embrace. Again, though it was irrational, it was almost as if she believed that the more love she gave her children, the more it would make up for the love she wanted so desperately to devote to her husband.
She went on then to tell them how Arthur’s body had been found by the river. She explained to them how it had looked like he’d been mugged and killed, and everyone mourned his passing.
But none had grieved so much as their mother, Maddie and Johnathan gathered, and even as she spoke and her voice wavered, broken and disjointed by devastated sobs, still now they could tell that her dear husband’s death had ruined her.
Having embarked upon this task with every intention of telling her children the truth, Emily did not leave out many details, save those that she knew would upset Maddie the most.
She told them of how, though she had cared for them during her every waking moment, she had descended into a spiralling pit of depression, completely shattered by what had happened.
The sky outside was bright now and light streamed in merrily through the windows, contrasting Emily’s words.
Glancing at Father Peter briefly as she spoke, their mother told them of how she had sought help from God.
She had known it would not bring Arthur back, for that was impossible, supposedly.
She had just wanted the pain to stop.
It was unbearable.
She couldn’t stand it any longer.
“And then I met Richard…” Emily said then, warily, and her voice was flinty and cold, as if the memory was a happy one painted blood red. “I had seen him in the village a few times already…” She continued. “But we had never met. Straight away, I thought my prayers had been answered…”