Chill! I’m not killing Skip. I SWEAR:

A Son Is A Son

Vic (Virginia Aurelia Millburn, Countess Harcaster aka Victoria Torrenes):

I buried my only son once. They sent his body home from his very first mission with the Interplanetary Diplomatic Service.

This all came back to me that morning, after the incident in the nursery. I remembered Scipio’s funeral

I received his coffin – embossed with the IDS logo – with all due ceremony, and planned his funeral, and received half the court and Queen Eleanor herself, all the while feeling none of this was real, or alternately as though my head were floating several feet above my body making me unable to connect with any of my own emotions.

I stood with the Queen-Empress of Britannia on High on one side of me, and Uncle Zymon, my late husband’s great uncle on the other, and watched them lower Scipio’s coffin into the marble-white mausoleum where his father had been buried four years before.

It was snowing lightly on my ancestral family cemetery and the white marble of which the various statues – queens and space captains and angels – had been sculpted made them look as though  they’d been sculpted of ice.

I held it together while the Archbishop read the service for the dead, familiar as it was, and while they closed the marble over my only son’s body. I held it while the band of the IDS played Strains of Earth, and while the Queen handed me the folded flag of Britannia that had covered Scipio’s coffin.

But when the band of the Space Force – because Scipio had become a war hero in the same battle that claimed his father’s life – played the sweet, haunting “Home of the Spacer” I broke down. To my everlasting shame, I felt tears coursing down my face.

Uncle Zymon and the Queen stood rigid, frozen, as though if they pretended I wasn’t crying no one, not even I would notice.

But I noticed. I didn’t feel sad, much less grief stricken. Instead I felt like a house where every window had been left open, the roof caved in, and icy wind and snow blew through. Just a shell with nothing in it.

The tears didn’t stop. I’m afraid the mersi cameras captured it, as the Queen gave me a box with Scipio’s second medal of valor, with the big spaceship and said how my son was being awarded posthumous honors: the cross of valor, the order of St. George, the—Oh, I don’t even remember it all. Because all I could think was that the tears would never stop. I’d just cry and cry and cry until presently all my tears would be gone and my body would be nothing but a cold husk that blew away.

You see, it was the third time I buried someone close to my heart. The third of them whose life had been lost in the service of the empire. Surely three was too much for one family?

 I remember when we’d learned that my much older brother died, far away fighting privateers who’d been harassing settlers at the very edges of the domains of Britannia on High, the Star Empire.

I was eight years old, in the library, working with my mathematics tutor when Father’s secretary came in, looking startled and wind blown and told me that Ambrose had died.

I didn’t cry. I didn’t even fully understand it. It was impossible.

Ambrose could not be dead.

He was the immortal, fifteen-year older-brother, the hero of my childhood, who had adventures in far away places and always returned with gifts for his little sister and stories of great adventures and exploits that made even Father listen in silence, in spellbound admiration.

There are people so much larger than life that they will never be stilled. Death will not dull them. For days, for weeks, I expected Ambrose to come striding in, telling us it was all a mistake. That somehow someone else had died and been taken for him. He’d give me jewelry, or a rare plant or some strange piece of music from a far away planet, and he’d laugh at us having believed him dead.

Not even Father’s starting to teach me how to administer the estate and everyone referring to me as Viscountess Webson, not even Ambrose’s funeral, one rainy day in the family cemetery with all the moss-covered statues and the jaunty tune of the IDS – Strains of Earth – played by a military band, had dented my internal certainty that it was all an awful mistake which would one day be corrected.

It was somehow an hoax, a monstruous confusion. I didn’t say it, of course. A mutter to that effect had got me a hard talking to from Father early on. So I didn’t say anything. But I knew Ambrose was alive somewhere and would come back home.

It was only when I was fourteen that the truth had sank in.

Father had sat at breakfast with me, reading his mail. At our level of society, the mail was not some electronic messages displayed on a reader, but real mail, in paper, often embossed papers or cards. Father always sat with his reader, of course, where he got news of the Empire, and business missives, and that sort of thing. But every once in a while the butler came in with an envelope on a silver salver.

This was one of those mornings. We’d been eating in silence, because Father believed that chatter over breakfast disturbed the digestion, and suddenly he made an exclamation, as the threw the card aside, pushed back his chair and got up from the table.

His sound had been either disgust or annoyance, or perhaps an exclamation of pain, I wasn’t sure which. But I waited until he was gone, and then got the card and read it. I picked it up and read, written in ink by some paid secretary, the announcement of Miriam’s marriage to Lysander StJohn, Duke of Drakeford.

And my mind stopped. I’d met Miriam, you see. She had spent the summer when I was seven and been introduced as Ambrose’s fiancé. She was a lovely young woman, graceful and lithe, with a cloud of dark hair and a playful gleam in her eyes. She was supposed to be my sister.

Suddenly, eight years later, it was all too real that Ambrose was dead. Because I’d seen the way Miriam looked at him, and it simply wasn’t possible that she’d marry someone else while Ambrose might still live.