It's Not Your Fault, Darling

Young Eddie was a child who was often ill, though he was hardly to blame for it. Rupert and Martha Galley's only child, he was not a hardy boy of robust constitution, not unlike most of the men that preceded him in his family. His leisure time was once spent in wild fields and forests, accompanying a flock of boisterous local children, but his parents put an end to that after their darling son survived a few too many bouts of scarlet fever, one severe case of chickenpox, and one broken pinky finger. Now his closest friends were those two girls from Wintercote who would visit Galley House every month, and their activities were restricted to those places which his parents could watch from the windows. And yet, the boy continued to be afflicted by illnesses of all sorts. Such was his condition on one cold, wet evening in February, 1916. Well, truthfully, he had already gotten through the worst of a very common cold, only burdened now by a slightly bothersome runny nose. But his parents insisted he stay in bed all day and all night, lest he overexert himself and have his condition worsen before it could truly get better.

And so Eddie sat in bed all day and all night. That was not the only thing he did, of course; even the most well-behaved lad of nine years would not resign himself to such a tiresome fate. He fancied himself a storyteller, and, just like the workspace of any storyteller worth their salt, his bed was absolutely littered with papers. Some contained drawings and maps, and most others contained words, scrawled in cursive befitting of a boy with only a few years of writing experience under his belt. In his excitement, he did not mark the page numbers on his elaborate tale. It would make for a lovely puzzle for him to sort through at a later date, but that was not his main concern at the moment, far from it No, the thing that concerned him was the grumbling let out by his stomach, which became more ferocious with each passing minute. He had already eaten dinner and was usually not permitted any snacks afterward—but the energy spent by warding off his cold and creating his stories left him feeling terribly ravenous. He wouldn't be able to tolerate this while trying to sleep, whenever that ended up being. Surely one snack, just this one time, would be alright.

He sat up, only then realizing how severely he had been hunching over his papers. He really could not wait to be free of this infernal bed and back at his desk, where one ought to do this very important sort of work. Tomorrow or maybe the day after, he reckoned, he would be. He had dealt with the common cold enough times that he believed he had a good sense for his body's recovery timeline. He leaned over and gave the rope next to his bed a good pull. He waited patiently for a butler to come to his aid, and then impatiently, as the minutes stretched on and he resorted to counting the intersecting stripes that decorated his blanket. He pulled again, two times now to impart a sense of urgency. No one came. How terribly bothersome, he thought. It seemed he would have to satisfy his hunger on his own.

Eddie carefully extracted himself from his bed, trying not to scatter his precious work all over the bedroom floor as the blankets shifted about. His journey through the cavernous, dimly-lit Galley House was similarly cautious, since he knew not where his parents were lurking. They would of course send him right back to bed if they knew he was making this late night expedition to the kitchen. It made him glad that he already knew which floorboards creaked the loudest and could steer well clear of them. The kitchen was just as empty as the rest of the house had been. Eddie was not surprised, after his ringing had gone unanswered, but was nonetheless disappointed. He had noticed the house being a bit more empty than it used to be, generally speaking. Two or three years ago, he could have found a chef here, preparing a pudding to be served the following day, a maid dusting off vases in the hallway, and a gardener tending to the lush lawn outside, had there not been a drizzling rain. Now he couldn't even find a single butler. He didn't know why exactly this change had occurred—his parents never did talk to him about the subject—but he was sure that no reason would have made him any less annoyed.

But still, he recognized that standing there and brooding wouldn't do him or his stomach any good, so he got to work on preparing a bite to eat. He fetched two slices of bread and a jar of strawberry jam from the pantry, then a butter knife from one of the cutlery drawers. He didn't need a plate, he had decided. He was going to be eating right then and there, anyway. He contentedly ate his hastily-constructed sandwich, and licked the jam off his fingers once he was finished. His stomach no longer roared at him in anger, grateful to its master. He had scraped a chair along the floor so he could reach the jam jar on the top shelf, and he climbed it once again to return it to its proper place. He, on the tips of his toes, extended his arm upwards towards the shelf with the precarious jar perched on his fingers. But alas, its balance was not as stable as he had thought, and it slipped from his grasp and crashed spectacularly onto the floor in front of him.

Eddie's sticky little hand, holding onto a jar that was no longer there, remained affixed overhead as he stared down at the mess he created. He listened for a few moments for voices or movement from another area of the house, trying to determine whether his parents had heard the piercing sound. No noises could be discerned. He supposed that meant he needed to go and find them. There was no chance he would attempt to clean all those hundreds of shards of glass and that gooey, red splatter by himself. Perhaps his mother would clean it, or perhaps she knew wherever the butler had run off to and could have him do it.

He wandered back through the halls of the house, now with a goal opposite to his original one. The basement, which the kitchen resided in, was empty, of course. So was the main floor. He did eventually find success upstairs, and he knew so because he had spotted a sliver of light on the floor whose origin could be traced to the study. As he drew closer to the room, the voices of each of his parents became clearer, and he realized that they were shaky and raised just slightly. It wasn't an argument—not yet at least—but it was clearly not a happy conversation. He paused, trying to work out what had upset them so much. There was the rustling of a newspaper, and the frantic scrape of a pen on paper, the supporting instrumentation to the words spoken. He heard many words, the meanings of which were unfamiliar to him. Taxes. Salaries. Budget. Conscripted. Exemption. Objector. He thought some of those words were related to the war; he overheard them from his classmates' gossiping.

"Mum? Dad?" his little voice croaked as he bravely stepped into the doorway. Both parents were seated at the grand desk near the back of the room. "What's the matter?"

Eddie's father folded up his newspaper and dropped it on the desk at the sight of his son, giving him no opportunity to read the headline which proclaimed "427 KILLED IN TORPEDO STRIKE, 1 SURVIVOR," in thick, bold letters. His mother sprang from her seat to approach her boy, abandoning the pad of paper which contained a rough calculation of the family's tight budget.

"Oh, Eddie, it's nothing at all to worry about! Just some boring adult things," she said with a suddenly saccharine tone and wide smile. She knelt down and let the smile fade from her face as she pulled out a handkerchief and wiped the snotty tip of her son's nose. Then she put her hands on her hips. "Now, Eddie. Why aren't you in bed like you're meant to be?"

He remembered then why he was there. Not to eavesdrop, but to inform them of the mess he made in the kitchen. He did so readily and truthfully, as he felt there to be no reason to lie. There was not another soul who could have been the culprit. He punctuated his account of events with an apology that he wouldn't do something like that ever again. He would be more careful next time, he promised.

"It's not your fault, darling!" his mum replied very quickly. "I'm sure it was just that dreadful cold giving you butter-fingers, poor angel. Not to mention Thornton being busy in the chapel. We'll have a talk with him and tell him to stay near the kitchen whenever you're ill. I'll go and clean it up in the meantime."

Eddie didn't drop the jar because of his cold, he had thought. His hands weren't clammy, nor were his arms shaky. He just didn't have a strong hold of the thing. But his mother said it was the cold's fault, and she was always right about everything, wasn't she? She was certainly right about that Thornton, at least! That man was the one responsible for this whole mess, now that he really thought about it. It never would have come to this if he had been there to fulfill Eddie's request in the first place. He sniffled and rubbed his sleeve across his face. His eyelids felt heavy. Maybe he wouldn't be in perfect health by tomorrow after all. "Thank you, Mum."

"It's quite alright, darling. Now, do you think you can get back to bed on your own or do you need Dad to carry you?"

Through the rapidly-encroaching haze of tiredness, he remembered that tornado of papers sitting on his bed. He would need to clean it up before he could sleep, and, as much as he would enjoy being carried off, his father didn't need to see all of that. Already he had taken on the attitude of the secretive artist, toiling away in his creative laboratory where no prying eyes could gaze upon his incomplete masterpieces. "I think I'll be alright by myself."

"Very well. Good night, Eddie." She gave him a light hug and stood up.

His father gave him a cheeky wave and smile from the desk. "Night, son. Sweet dreams!"

The boy waved back and returned to his room. He drifted into soft embrace of slumber with great ease. And his dreams were sweet indeed, with nebulous images of high taxes and servants conscripted into war and broken strawberry jam jars nowhere in sight. All was right in his world, just as it ought to be.