Guava and Trail Mix with Whipped Cream and a Cherry On Top
Story: Timeless { backstory | index }
Title: Heretics
Rating: G
Challenge: Guava #29: mother/father knows best, Trail Mix #19: sitting room/parlour
Toppings/Extras: whipped cream, cherry (present tense)
Wordcount: 648
Summary: Lidia Graham’s mother and uncle discuss her father: she’s glad he’s not ordinary.
Notes: Spoken Spanish is in italics. Liddy is sixteen when the original story begins: this is when she’s about six. Still whipped cream?
Liddy likes to sit on the steps outside of the house she shares with her mother, Uncle Gaspard, his wife Noélle and their two daughters to study. It is her place of preference: the stone beneath her bony buttocks are sun-warmed and she is allowed shade by the large trellis that grows between her home and that of the house opposite: the trellis is rich with vines and small pip-like grapes just beginning to ripen. The leaves cast a pleasant dappled shadow across the road where mules and people treck to and fro.
The seaside town of Santa Isadora is a pretty place, Grecian in architecture, all square blocks of sun-warmed stone that seem to roll onto the beaches, built sturdily into the rocks and packed close together. There is one main road that is big enough for carts and buckboards, but the rest of the stone houses have hardly a gap between them. The narrow streets are steep and winding, almost all of them shaded by the grapevine trellis that has crept over the entire town. Most of the houses are either sand-coloured stone or bleached whitish, and the flat rooftops are all covered in hanging washing and chairs and toys.
Huddled on the steps, there is a window at her elbow that leads into the sunken sitting room of their home. It is slightly ajar, and through it she can hear conversation: the rest of her family are in there, all of the residents of their house. Although she is not particularly listening, she hears her name and lowers her book.
“Where is Liddy?” Uncle Gaspard asks.
“Outside, studying,” her mother replies mildly.
“All gone!” her three-year-old cousin Mireia coos to nobody in particular. She is midway through her second year and won’t stop talking nonsense. “No shoes?”
“Studying?” Uncle Gaspard’s voice is suddenly a little colder. “Studying English?”
Liddy realises that she is leaning closer to the window, though she is careful not to be spotted. A pair of mules clop past in the summer haze, both of them led by one man with a large straw hat covering his face from the beating sun. She is close enough now to hear her mother sigh.
“Of course, Gaspard: what else?”
She hears her uncle harrumph. Her other cousin, who’s just a baby, starts griping and she hears Aunt Noélle fussing over him. But she’s not interested in that: her mother is talking again, with reproach in her voice.
“There’s nothing wrong with it, Gaspard-it is a useful language to learn, with all of the merchants and voyagers coming in.”
“But that’s not why she is learning it, is it? It is because of her father.”
Liddy frowns. Of course she’s learning it for her father. She can’t wait for Daddy to come back and see her again. He always brings her something so exciting and probably expensive, and he’s so tall and handsome and kind to her.
“If that motivates her to do something productive with her time, let her be,” her mother says sniffily.
Then Uncle Gaspard says the fateful words:
“He is an English heretic, and worse-a pirate.”
The moment is spoilt by young Mireia: “What that egg doing?”
Before she can hear any more, Liddy leaves her beloved book of English on the step and walks down the crooked little street towards where the port is. It’s not a big town, and she’s there in a few turns and mere minutes. There are big ships and small ships, with their rippling romantic sails, the playful ocean slapping their sides every few moments. The horizon seems bright, brighter than the sky and the sea put together, as though that line is the portal to another world altogether.
Liddy sighs and throws her dark hair over one shoulder. She’s six years old, not stupid-she’d worked out her father’s profession long ago.