Chapter 53 Ormdale
Chapter fifty-three
Ormdale
It was not Janushek’s best day, not by far.
There had been an incident up at the kilns, and a worker had been injured.
Though it might have been far worse than it was, Janushek could not help remembering the accident many years before that had left he himself scarred and without a job as a chemist’s assistant.
Not to mention the accidents he had witnessed at the dye factory.
These supplied him with a different variety of nightmare, the kind where he could not reach drowning people in time.
Janushek sent the man home on half-pay, and—not for the first time—cursed the lack of a doctor in the dale.
He’d thought once that Gwendolyn Worms might fill this role, but it seemed she had no desire to return to the scenes of her youth.
Not that Janushek could blame her. Gwendolyn had found a fresh start in London, far away from the ghosts of her past, just as Janushek had found one in a remote Yorkshire dale.
He arrived back at the cottage gate to find his daughter Bella playing with Smok in the garden. As soon as he saw her, his body loosened. He’d never imagined himself as a father, but in the end, nothing could have felt more natural to him.
Bella ran to him, and he braced to swing her onto his shoulders, but she shook her head, her curls flying, her eyes solemn.
Every time she looked at him like this, he felt a heady mixture of delight and terror. The poets didn’t tell you what this was like. Perhaps because they couldn’t.
“Mam said stay in garden,” she said in her delicious Yorkshire accent, and shaking him off, she ran back to Smok.
Janushek saw the door was ajar, as if Lily were keeping an eye on the child from inside while she had private conversation, perhaps with Pip. Then he heard the kitchen door at the back of the cottage bang shut in a way that sounded intentional. Janushek went inside quickly.
Lily was alone now, hand gripping the chimneypiece, head bowed. She was shaking.
Janushek immediately folded her in his arms.
“My love, I am here, what is wrong?”
Too late, he realised he was speaking his own language to her, which she didn’t understand.
“I’m sorry,” he said in English. “I wasn’t thinking.”
She swivelled to face him, gripping his arms with fierce affection. “Don’t dare apologise for that! I like it, Brik.”
Janushek searched her face.
“You told Pip,” he said.
She nodded. “It didn’t go well, as tha sees.” Her head dropped onto his shoulder. “I’m ashamed of myself. There’s Violet and Miss Edith, jumping on dragons’ backs, just for a lark. I fall to pieces telling my own son what I should’ve told him years ago.”
“There are things much more frightening than riding dragons,” Janushek said to his wife with certainty. “And one of them is raising children.”
She laughed into his shoulder, then looked up. “Thee came home early. Is all well?”
“I came home for something more important.”
“And what was that?” she whispered.
“You,” he said, and kissed her.