The Hawkman Read online

  The Hawkman

  Jane Rosenberg LaForge

  Amberjack Publishing

  New York | Idaho

  Amberjack Publishing

  1472 E. Iron Eagle Drive

  Eagle, Idaho 83616

  http://amberjackpublishing.com

  This book is a work of fiction. Any references to real places are used fictitiously. Names, characters, fictitious places, and events are the products of the author’s imagination, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, places, or events is purely coincidental.

  Copyright © 2018 by Jane Rosenberg LaForge

  All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this book, in part or in whole, in any form whatsoever without the prior written permission of the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical reviews and certain other noncommercial uses permitted by copyright law.

  Publisher’s Cataloging-in-Publication data

  Names: LaForge, Jane Rosenberg, author.

  Title: The Hawkman : a fairy tale of the Great War / by Jane Rosenberg LaForge.

  Description: New York, NY ; Eagle, ID: Amberjack Publishing, 2018

  Identifiers: ISBN 978-1-944995-67-6 (pbk.) | 978-1-944995-68-3 (ebook) | LCCN 2017954112

  Summary: Eva and The Hawkman, a vagrant, fall in love. Mortally ill, she transforms on their wedding night, leaving an empty body and an augmented widower.

  Subjects: LCSH Post traumatic stress disorder--Fiction. | Veterans--Fiction. | World War, 1914-1918--Great Britain--Fiction. | Great Britain--History--20th century--Fiction. | Pianists--Fiction. | Musicians--Fiction. | Teachers--Fiction. | Historical fiction. | Love stories. | Fantasy fiction. | Fairy tales. | BISAC FICTION / Literary.

  Classification: LCC PS3612.A3768 H39 2018 | DDC 813.6--dc23

  Cover Design: Micaela Alcaino

  For Patrick

  and his people

  Prologue

  No one said anything about the condition of the body, though it was without the weight and rigor of death. One might not have detected its lifelessness if not for its skin. How pale it was: wax-like as if illuminated, a different kind of transparency. There was none of the blueness of it, of blood stopping at the surface. Nor were there scars from a struggle, illness, or the exit of a spirit. One might have instead remarked that the skin had the same cast as a quill, new and untested. Like the shaft of a feather, or bone made external.

  But that was only what the ambulance men saw as they first approached the body in the wedding bed, to see what they would be disposing of. When they slid their hands beneath her shoulders, they noticed how the flesh there had taken on the appearance of another animal’s: a bird’s, specifically, dressed and ready for some sort of holiday presentment. Like a Christmas goose, perhaps, as though each follicle shuddered at its plucking, since the downy barbs that once secured feathers had been wrenched from their perches. Farther down the back, there were not scratches but marks more subtle; if magnified, they might have recalled the leather that outfits a bellows with its many folds, to pump out the air purposefully trapped within. To a physician’s eyes, they might have seemed the marks that coincide with the end of a pregnancy, though there was no pregnancy in this instance.

  The body was discovered where the bridegroom had said it would be, in the master bedroom upon the second floor. But the ambulance men did not know what to think of the room they had to enter, half in disarray and half absolutely settled, ordered, as though it had been just appointed as a honeymoon suite. The bedclothes were tangled and wet, the mattress partially rousted from its frame. The windows were open and the curtains blew about, but there was no wind. The skirt of her wedding costume swayed from the back of a chair on which it was hung, the matching shoes neatly stacked with the rest in the closet. Everything was light and dry, wrung out as though a gale had overtaken the room just moments earlier. But it was far too early in the season for such a storm.

  The body was similarly insubstantial, without any of the bloat they knew to anticipate, and none of the smell they dreaded. Indeed, as they transported it down the stairs, out of the house, and into their vehicle, they felt as though the body’s heft diminished, until it was something both men thought they could carry in the palm of their hands.

  The morning following the death, and all the mornings after, even after the body had been buried, flowers appeared on the doorstep of the house. Calla lilies, angel trumpets, moonflowers—their petals the same crisp white as the deceased’s neck and hands. They had nowhere else to appear, these flowers, as the bridegroom was immediately evicted from the premises. The house was owned by the Bridgetonne Women’s College, which meant the local earl had a definitive interest. He took the death, as he took all opportunities afforded to him, to finally rid himself of the bridegroom, though the bridegroom returned, morning after morning, with his tribute. Had he been permitted inside, he might have left his offering in the bedroom, or set the flowers in a vase on the small table in what served as an entryway. It was such a small place, no more than a cottage, where he and his bride had lived chastely before the marriage.

  The earl, meanwhile, congratulated himself that the newly-made widower did not parade the body for all of Bridgetonneshire to witness. Instead the bereaved had marched the length of the college alone, into the village, and finally onto the earl’s property to notify everyone of the death. The earl considered whether he should be grateful for the man’s behavior that afternoon: stoic, obedient, if still off-putting. He stood outside respectfully as the ambulance men fetched his bride from upstairs, and then as Lord Thorton and his attendants inspected the place for any damage. As they found none, the earl would have to admit to himself the slight disappointment he felt that the man and woman had been such dutiful tenants. The earl instructed his attendants to explain to the new bridegroom that he was heretofore prohibited from entering said structure permanently. Had they known the source of the man’s discomfiting habits, it would not have quelled their suspicions, though many villagers had, by then, including the earl’s wife and son.

  The flowers the widower carried to the doorstep wilted in his hands somewhat, so that their trumpet-shaped petals approximated the crepe-like nature of his bride’s skin, along her back. People said he chose those flowers because of their trumpet shape, as though he was trying to call out to her in some way or listen for a message she had left him on the wind. This made sense, knowing what they did about him, but it did not help him ever hear that message, whatever it might have been. By the day’s end, those flowers came to take after the condition of whom they honored: deflated in texture and purpose. And the man who had brought them had been plunged into an ever-widening silence.

  One

  This is a story about a man who thought he was a bird and the woman who helped him find his humanity again. But before such humble marvels might transpire, there was much talk about him in the village, though he did not live there. He could not be said to have lived anywhere, given the way that he lived. He had neither an address nor regular box at the post. He moved from alley to alley, bin to bin. The pubs would not admit him. Where he slept, kept his belongings, put together the wherewithal to walk, run, and keep on the move remained as a mystery to everyone. They thought perhaps he had a hunting ground, as birds of prey do, or a circuit, and he roamed it in ever-widening rounds.

  What he did have was hair, a great blaze of it, on his head and face, and a look that the villagers found most disturbing. He had two eyes, of course, but people could never see more than one at a time through the thicket of his appearance, and the one they could see never shut for sleep, nor for any instance of pain, fear, joy, or surprise; so much so that people thought he must hav
e had a second pair of eyelids, just as some reptiles do. His features were buried beneath a beard that had grown so long it had collected things: leaves, twigs, bits of dirt, the gristle of what he ate—fish heads and the occasional hock from the butcher’s shop. Yet it was his eye, or both of them, that attracted the most notice and gossip—their unnerving brilliance. It was hungry and restless; and it earned him his nickname.

  It must have been the children who had given him this name, because of his eyes, the way he kept watch on everything, the coat he wore, and the scream that was his speech. The coat hid his clothes all the way to his feet, and, in the eyes of the children, when he raised his arms and ran toward them, it took on the look of a coat of feathers: a bewitching, smothering cape. He did not speak as a habit, but when tapped on the shoulder, or told that he had dropped a farthing, he would emit a piercing sound that might inspire one to weep. A screech it was, and it fell upon the village as though he had thrown a plea up to God or the angels, and it had been rejected. It hurtled back to earth so ferociously that those who had been in the Great War thought it sounded like the descent of a shell.

  Though he walked as a man might if he had been broken in the middle, the children did not fall for this act and said his hands were powerful—creatures to be feared. He could catch a child with his long dirty fingers, latch onto the child’s neck as a bird uses its talons to carry its prey, and feast on the child’s neck before he took on the eyes, nose, and lips. His pockets were said to rattle with the molars of his victims, but the sound more likely came from the occasional coins he managed to collect.

  The older boys taunted him, threw stones as he walked past, or they attacked him outright, smearing their greasy wrappings in his face. He tended not to fight back. One group of boys was known to have tried poisoning him, by slopping up waste from the street and disguising it in some rotting bread they handed him as he was begging. The Hawkman took to scavenging from behind the butcher’s or the pub after that incident.

  Bridgetonne was not without other misfits: old maids who, in an earlier time, might have been mistaken for witches, and bachelors who, likewise, would have been called out as warlocks. But by no means was the village haunted. It was a common village, with shops, cottages, a restaurant, in addition to the pub and inn, and all the requisite amenities of civilization. The Catholic church was the largest, in the size of its building, but only because it had been built before the Protestant. Its members had to compete with one another for seats in the pews or spots in the churchyard. The outskirts of the village, where the grand estate lay, hosted a women’s college, which produced nurses, governesses, and other young ladies of use.

  The college had been endowed by the fifth earl of Bridgetonneshire, and now it fell to the seventh, Arthur Thorton, to maintain the boarding school. Lord Thorton, as he was known, was far more proud of his uniforms and the decorations they had collected, through his service in the Boer Wars, than he was of his educational endeavors. He did not make it known how much of that service was performed from behind a desk, as he was a captain who organized and ran the refugee camps. The catastrophe that was those camps soured the young lord on many responsibilities and customs and the propensity of some women to upend the careful architecture of the world, as envisioned and made reality by their perfectly competent male counterparts. But duty is duty, and, at the urging of his wife, Lady Margaret, Lord Thorton affirmed his support for the cause of women’s education, even if he was schooling teenaged girls.

  For the most recent martial conflict, Lord Thorton fulfilled his duty in a number of ways, including through the most common route taken by men of his class and station. His only son and heir, Christopher, was sent in his stead, along with precise instructions to his commanding officers to keep the next earl of Bridgetonneshire far and clear from any displays of organized benevolence toward the enemy. Such affairs inevitably end badly, the lord lectured his son before his departure, and Arthur Thorton knew this as plainly as he knew the war would end by Christmas, which of course it did not. Still, Christopher returned before the war was far from over, though badly injured, and he quickly retired his military dress clothes. The old lord continued to wear his to the balls, parties, and picnics he hosted. He reasoned it was reassuring for the mothers, wives, and sisters of local boys who had been to war and were slow in coming back.

  It was the most immediate goal of Lord Thorton, throughout the war and in its aftermath, to shore up the morale of the village. Aside from emphasizing his own small part in a victorious war of the past, he wanted to remove any other traces of the contemporary morass. He stocked the local grocer’s shelves with as much of his own larder as could be spared, to avoid the rationing. If the resources could not be found to hold the annual flower show or a choral performance or some other concert, he would find them: a stage or musicians, the prizes, or even the audience. The black bunting hanging from his own estate and from the buildings of the college during the war he had resolutely replaced with roses, ribbons, and the other adornments of victory. He sent his daughters to the city, so that they might marry that much more quickly, and he rushed the nurses and doctors at the military hospital to bring his son home before his leg wound might have healed properly.

  Lord Thorton did not necessarily believe the conclusion of the Great War signaled a new age for him, his family, or his country. He was too old for that sort of belief, having been introduced to the truth behind such triteness in South Africa. But he was most eager to dispatch with the concessions the British public had made at the home front to support the war overseas, and to hasten the return of normality. And, after having taken the initiative so ardently, Lord Thorton saw nothing between himself and his goal but for the presence of The Hawkman. The Hawkman smelled like the war, or perhaps more accurately, its refugees; his wanderings exuded a strange residue onto the walls and pavement of the village, which had to reflect poorly on Lord Thorton and all village residents.

  The skulking, cunning nature of The Hawkman was peculiarly redolent of the Boer refugees who had tasked the young lord with alleviating their voluntary poverty, the tenacity of their communicable desert diseases, and their clamorous appetites. Lord Thorton believed that it was always the worst of people who refused to be helped, despite their proclamations that they are the most desirous of it. Tacitly supporting any beneficent enterprise to feed, clothe, and comfort a virtual Bedouin of the British countryside did not align with either Lord Thorton’s inclinations or prejudices.

  Lord Thorton had learned, through dealings with his superiors in South Africa, that it was far less deleterious to one’s record and reputation neither to directly order whatever improvements he wished, nor to draft people in any specific cause. He instead simply made his feelings known at a meal, or some other seemingly insignificant gathering, and then he watched, with a glazed kind of amusement, as his wants were made into the real ambitions of those around him.

  This was precisely his strategy as he gathered the more prominent villagers for luncheon at his home, just as the spring was returning to Bridgetonneshire. He wished for his daughters, upon their return, to freely amble over the grounds of his mansion and the fields of the county without fear for their safety; he wished the same for all the young women of the college, who would too soon end their training to begin their dour lives in the cities. Indeed, he wished for all women and girls to enjoy the liberty their brothers and fathers had fought for, without encountering lechery, thievery, and common depredation in their wanderings.

  Lady Margaret congratulated Lord Thorton on his progressive view of womanhood once he announced the agenda for the luncheon to the guests assembled. The reverend and a visiting countess, a cousin to Lady Margaret, rumbled their approval, as did the president of the historical society. Of course the presumptive heir, the earl’s convalescing son Christopher, was loudest in his compliance. But there was one guest who did not join in the preparations for applause: Eva Williams.

  �
�There is poverty in this village?” she asked, as slowly and as deliberately as she could, because it seemed to her that whatever she said, being a foreigner, was met with a discomfiting surprise, as if she had spoken too loudly or boldly, no matter the topic.

  “Perhaps not the poverty that someone like you has been exposed to,” said Christopher, who felt as honor-bound to rush to his father’s defense as he did to impress Miss Williams. “Here we are not burdened by the kinds of conditions you have in your Chicago or your New York.”

  “They are not necessarily my cities,” Miss Williams said, as if she was repeating a phrase from an elocution lesson. Miss Williams was cordial but stiff for an American, and she seemed to invest a great effort in not being seen as another rude colonial—hence her tentative, if not diffident, manner. She framed each word as though as it was to be delivered on its own silver platter, then smoothed away by a silk napkin. “I could never live in Chicago, so large, so riotous. Yet in your own cities, I believe, do you not find ragged—”

  “Perhaps in the cities,” Christopher quickly interrupted, “but we are not talking about that kind of poverty.”

  “Poverty is the same everywhere,” Miss Williams said. “Particularly in the eyes of the impoverished.”

  “Yet in the eyes of those who must provide for them—my father, for instance—” Christopher reminded her, “those differences are quite significant. A minority of the impoverished is quite deserving: a soldier who returns from battle, visibly wounded, unable to provide for himself and his family. But what we find most are lost causes, the inherited cases, the offspring of degradation or decadence.

  “Under our—my father’s—stewardship,” Christopher continued, “Bridgetonne is no longer host to any unfortunates.”

  “Excuse me, Christopher,” Lady Margaret quickly corrected him, once she espied an affirming nod from her husband. “One such unfortunate has been especially confounding. We have tried, but we cannot seem to be rid of him.”