1 The never ending sorrow

  Life was complete. Joseph and Margaret finally had a son. They cherished his birth and did everything to make little Francis feel safe and loved. Joseph remembered his smile for the first time as he was in Margaret’s hold, the first time he walked, and the first word he said, which was Dada. It all seemed like a brief dream of peace and happiness. How fast did time pass!

  With the priest’s words, Joseph zoned out of his memories. The crowd around him in black clothes was a harsh reminder of the cruel reality. He wasn’t with his family anymore. He was sitting in the garden close to a pit. The peers were there, silently watching the priest as he talked.

  The sight of the pit made Joseph’s skin crawl. Before he could sort his thoughts about the depth of the darkness in that hole, four servants approached it while carrying a coffin.

  Joseph sat still, realizing he had a bottle of alcohol in his hold. He didn’t remember when he had picked it up, but he appreciated his old self for doing so. As they lowered the coffin into the hole, the reality set in. They were not in a garden. It was a graveyard. Joseph sipped from the bottle, the longest sip he could ever take.

  It didn’t soothe his pain. Nothing could. The loss was paralyzing. “Margaret Elizabeth Ford” was written on a small tablet by the grave. Margaret, Joseph’s sweet wife, was gone just like everyone else in his life.

  “My lord?” The voice of Joseph’s consultant broke through his train of memories. Joseph looked at him by his side while they were still in the graveyard with nobles around them. He was too drunk to speak, and the consultant, Mr. Lancaster, was aware.

  “Do you wish to say a few words?” Mr. Lancaster asked. Joseph couldn’t put two words together, let alone speak about his wife’s death. He looked at the grave again, and suddenly something else caught his attention—the tombstone by his wife’s grave with a familiar name, Joffre Franciss Ford.

  It was as if Joseph had forgotten about his son’s death. Seeing the grave awakened a pain he never wanted to experience again.

  “Lord Mainwood?” the consultant said, hoping Joseph would speak only a few words.

  Joseph ignored Mr. Lancaster’s request and sat still. Margaret’s grave was filled now. Not even the wooden sight of the coffin was visible. He took a slow and long sip of the bottle while everyone watched him. It wasn’t like him to be this disrespectful and ill-mannered toward the guests.

  The voices around him didn’t reach his ear anymore. He shook his head and stood as the world spun around him. Mr. Lancaster tried to steady him, but Joseph pulled his arm back and walked away from the crowd.

  Desperate for a moment of comfort, Joseph entered his wife’s bedchamber. The place, he realized then, that he had never entered before. If they ever shared a bed, it would be in his bedchamber, not hers. The room was clean, and everywhere smelled like soap. The housemaids must have cleaned the whole place, and he hated them for it.

  He wanted to see his wife’s room as she had left it. He wanted to see how she folded her sheets, left the curtains half open, or put her perfumes and jewelry on her dressing table. But he couldn’t see any of them. The maids had done a quite good job at cleaning her room.

  Perhaps he could find her fragrance in her bedsheets. With one knee on the perfectly smoothened bed, he buried his face into a pillow and sniffed deeply. There was no scent. Would he even remember what she used to smell like? As he held the other pillow to search for the faintest hint of his wife, it suddenly struck him; he didn’t remember anything about her.

  Were her eyes brown or blue? Maybe green?

  Did she use a bonnet on her head?

  What was her favorite dress?

  Did she drink tea as much as other women did?

  Joseph got back on his feet and looked around the room to find anything of Margaret so as to stop resenting himself for not remembering her and how she used to be. But there was nothing. He turned around and saw his reflection in the tall mirror. His heart thumped fast. Despair was the only thing in his sight, and it disgusted him to his guts. The frustration and rage took over him. He lifted his fist and punched the mirror so hard that it seemed like the time stopped. The mirror shattered to a hundred pieces, echoing through the large room and filling Joseph’s ears.

  The shattered pieces took an eternity to settle on the floor. Joseph stood there, looking at his reflection in the remaining parts as if it could restore everything he had lost. He was broken, both on the reflection and inside. The outburst of emotions was rare from him. For a second, he saw his father within those broken pieces; the angry man with no control over his life. Wasn’t he just like his father now? Angry, broken, confused, and a failure, just like him.

  An unfamiliar sound distracted him. He looked down and realized a heavy flow of blood was dripping from his hand without him even realizing. A piece of mirror was stuck between his flesh and bone. He grunted, pulling the piece out in one motion without thinking. As the wound widened, the stream of blood became impossible to stop.

  Joseph sat on the floor by the broken mirror and waited for what could be his demise at any second if no one found him. The servants found him immediately. They had heard the shattering and opened the door in a rush to help him.

  “My lord!” one maid squeaked as she hurried toward him. Another maid ran outside to grab a clean cloth and attend to his wound.

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  Mr. Lancaster appeared in sight, standing in the doorframe. His eyes widened at the scene in front of him. What he feared was happening. Joseph was losing himself and his mind. Mr. Lancaster didn’t approach Joseph. He didn’t want to startle him or provoke him to do something unexpected. So he stood there and waited for the maids to wrap his wound.

  After that day, Joseph turned numb. He didn’t scream or cry. He was always drinking and masking his emotions. The loss of the countess was a good enough reason for everyone at Mainwood to feel drained and hopeless. Joseph’s lack of grief didn’t help the matter. Mr. Lancaster decided to check up on him at midnight, thinking he could have a comforting talk with him, so he grabbed his lantern and walked the long hallway toward Joseph’s bedchamber. “Open the door,” he ordered the servent when he reached the room.

  “His lordship is not in his room,” the footman said. Lancaster’s eyebrows furrowed. The more Joseph wandered around, the more in danger he was. He could easily hurt himself with that state of mind.

  But Joseph was doing nothing. He was sitting in the graveyard by the tombstones of his family members, silently watching them. Mr. Lancaster saw him from a distance and thanked God that he wasn’t in danger. He approached Joseph and stood by him.

  There were so many things to speak of yet no word could possibly describe the devastating situation they were living in. The first ray of light brightened the dark atmosphere of the graveyard, and Lancaster knew the sun was about to rise.

  “I will go to the village tomorrow,” said Joseph, surprising Mr. Lancaster by breaking the silence. “Mr. Prowley will bring ten sheep. I was thinking perhaps we could reduce it to five since it’s mating season.”

  “What are you talking about?” Mr. Lancaster asked in confusion.

  Joseph looked at him. “Ten sheep, Thomas. Don’t you remember? We discussed it.”

  “I know what we discussed. But it was before the countess passed.”

  “We shall take them tomorrow. We’ve been too late already.”

  “Because we’ve been grieving.”

  Joseph desperately tried to avoid the countess’ death. He ignored what Mr. Lancaster said. “It’s a bit cold,” he said. “I’m going back.”

  “The countess died!” Mr. Lancaster said in a louder tone to bring Joseph to his senses.

  Joseph looked at him, trying to understand why Mr. Lancaster would want to hurt him. “What is this behavior?”

  Mr. Lancaster looked back at him. “Is that all that you can do?” he said, infuriating Joseph even more. “Your entire family is gone, and you want to bring ten lambs to the village?”

  “I-I don’t understand,” Joseph stuttered, wondering why Mr. Lancaster was hostile all of a sudden.

  “Of course you don’t. You’ve turned into your father.”

  He shouldn’t have said that. He knew he shouldn’t have compared Joseph to his father. As soon as the words reached him, Joseph lunged toward Mr. Lancaster and punched him in the face. Mr. Lancaster stumbled backward, almost losing his balance, but he didn’t fall. He felt the pain in his teeth. Joseph didn’t let Lancaster recover. He leapt toward him and grabbed him by his collar.

  “I’m not my father!” he shouted, tightening his grip on Mr. Lancaster’s collar. Lancaster said nothing. He only stared back into Joseph’s angry eyes. “I’m not that cold-hearted bastard!” Something broke inside him. His lips started trembling. Without releasing Lancaster’s collar, he wept like a gloomy cloud on a rainy day. “I’m not him!” his repeated words echoed in the silence of the graveyard while he shook Lancaster by his collar to make him understand, but the emphasis was only to convince himself.

  Mr. Lancaster watched Joseph cry like he never had, but he kept his mouth shut and only stood still. Finally, Joseph let go of his collar and turned to the graves by them. His wife’s grave was still fresh. The sight burnt Joseph’s heart like an ignited coal that never turned into ashes. He walked toward it and lay on the mud and soil, wailing without considering Mr. Lancaster’s presence.

  That’s what Mr. Lancaster wanted. He wanted Joseph to mourn like everyone else would. Watching him like that pained him more than anything, but it was the only way to make Joseph understand he needed to explore his emotions instead of drinking alcohol to sink them into the depths of his soul.

  The sun was finally out, and there were no clouds in the sky. Joseph and Mr. Lancaster were still by the graves, sitting silently. Joseph had stopped sobbing. “I am him,” he said, breaking into Mr. Lancaster’s thoughts.

  Mr. Lancaster looked at Joseph, but Joseph kept looking at the graves. “You knew him better than I did. I am just like him now. Cold, angry, and desperate.” Another tear left his eye as he spoke. “They say you become what you fear the most. I feared that old man so much, I turned into him.”

  “I didn’t mean it, Joseph,” Mr. Lancaster said, trying to calm him by calling him by his first name. Formality meant nothing in that intimate moment.

  “No. I am like him,” Joseph said, wiping his nose with his sleeve. “Everyone in my family died, Thomas.” Thinking about his past caused him more pain. “My mother died, and I didn’t cry. You’d say I was a child, and I didn’t remember her. But then James died. He was my brother… my only friend.”

  “You were in shock,” Lancaster said, still trying to ease Joseph’s pain.

  “My father died. I wouldn’t cry for his death in a hundred years. But my son?” Joseph’s tears rolled down his face. “I didn’t mourn my son, Thomas. My one and only son, my Francis.” He barely controlled his emotions as he spoke. “We had him after almost a decade. The day we buried him was sunny. There was no cloud in the sky. I remember it perfectly because I had convinced myself if it had rained I would have cried. But let’s be honest. I would never cry because ‘a man must never be that weak.’ And ‘an earl never cries because an earldom relies on him.’”

  He hated repeating the words of his father. “But God damn me, Thomas. I should’ve cried. Why didn’t I mourn my son? What is wrong with me? Why didn’t I say that I loved him?”

  It was the first time Thomas Lancaster heard the word “love” from Joseph. It was strange and heart-wrenching. Joseph had lost everything and everyone but never grieved normally once in his life. Lancaster knew Joseph wasn’t like his father. He only wanted to aggravate him so Joseph would let out the piled up grief.

  “He had to know, right?” Joseph asked, and Lancaster realized that he was finally looking at him. His eyes were swollen, and his face looked a lot thinner than before. “Could he possibly not know?” Joseph repeated his question to get the slightest affirmation from Lancaster so his conscience would ease. Lancaster didn't know what he was talking about. "He knew I loved him, yeah?" Joseph asked. It became clear now. Why did the three words “I love you” matter so much now for a man who never experienced affection in his entire life?

  Joseph’s mother died when he was but three. He didn’t get to grow up with her love. His father was a tempered man who beat Joseph to death. So Joseph was raised with no love and affection. People assumed he was just as heartless as his father. But that morning under the dim light, Lancaster realized Joseph needed to love and be loved more than anyone in the entire world.

  Joseph was still staring at Lancaster, waiting for an answer, so Lancaster nodded repeatedly. “He was your son. Of course he knew.” He approached Joseph and hugged him. Joseph wasn’t used to affection, so he didn’t know what he was supposed to do. But Lancaster’s hug felt so safe and warm that he started sobbing again. He hugged him back and released all his emotions.

  Curious about Joseph's next chapter in life? :)