blueberry yoghurt pocky chain with butterscotch and sprinkles
Story: Timeless { backstory | index }
Title: Homecoming
Rating: G
Challenge: Blueberry Yoghurt #2: homecoming
Toppings/Extras: butterscotch, pocky chain, sprinkles
Wordcount: 600
Summary: A hopeful return to London for Jack and Tilly Prowse and their growing family.
Notes: Six-part pocky chain. Spans a few years. Some time after Her Last Friend. I feel bad for what I do to this family...
He wanted to move back to London because he wanted his boys to be London lads.
A Londoner was not merely regional but a species of person, and Jack Prowse was a Londoner to the bone. So arrogant, so wonderfully stubborn, so quick to talk back. There was no greater furnace to smelt real men, he felt, than the wily and crooked streets of London Town. His boys would be good cockney boys, just like him.
Besides, all of the money was in London-perhaps they would be luckier there. His wife could wear pretty dresses like she used to.
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She wanted to move back to London to perhaps find her relatives, or any sign of her previous household. They were on her mind all of the time.
Two sons they had, now: Jude and Micah. Jude was two and Micah just a newborn babe when they made their journey from Reading to London, back to the town of their roots. She doted on them-they were the reason that she lived. Matilda and Jack didn’t always get on, but they loved their sons, and really they loved each other too.
It would be nice to see her hometown again.
-----
After it turned out her aunt had died of grout just a week before their arrival, she and Jack had despaired. They were in Reading, a strange town, with no money and Tilly’s family most probably dead and nowhere else to turn. The old lady at the Reading Abby hospitium allowed them to stay, for which the two of them were very grateful. Jack did whatever work he could and Tilly cleaned and cooked for the pilgrims. Tilly turned quiet and meek and mumbled that her parents had died of plague, ashamed at the lowliness she had been brought to.
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They were married when Tilly was fourteen and Jack sixteen-they could only afford shared lodgings between them, and reputation demanded that even at their ages they could not share a home until married. That wasn’t the only reason, of course; Jack was besotted, and Tilly flattered by this.
She had Jude a year later. It wasn’t easy. Jack worked smelting muntz metal, a type of brass forged from three parts copper and two parts zinc, cheap and flexible, used mostly in casting. The furnaces were hot and he didn’t like it much, but dutifully he worked as he ought.
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Micah was born on a Tuesday, a rainy day, and he was born with the bluest eyes that either of his parents had ever seen. They darkened to blackish brown like Jude’s after two weeks, but they always remembered his brightly-lit eyes.
At seventeen, Tilly found the birth a little easier although there was a terrible panic that she had contracted childbed fever-it turned out however to be a mild virus, a merciful virus that eased off after four days and threw forgiveness onto the Prowse family. They tried to enjoy their time at the top of Fortune’s wheel.
-----
London had not changed: it was so similar that it hurt a little to see it, as though they had never been there. They had not been missed. The same beggar-boys ran thin-legged through the crowds and pink-armed women called to each other window to window on the outreaching rooftops. It was noisy and full and lively. The Prowse family looked around in wonder atop the cart they had borrowed.
Jack was pleased and put an arm around his young wife, which he had not found the time to do for a while. Perhaps their tide would change in London.