Guardian of the Gold Breathers

Dragon Moon Press

Copyright © 2015 elise stephens

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Cover Design by Amalia Chitulescu

Edited by Katie Flanagan

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This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, brands, media, and incidents are either the product of the author's imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to similarly named places or to persons living or deceased is unintentional.

PRINT ISBN 978-1-988256-35-1

EPUB ISBN 978-1-988256-36-8

For George,

my little dragon

CHAPTER ONE

"Are you quite certain the lad could not have escaped? Perhaps he hid himself? We’ve combed the forest twice over and discovered no sign of him. The young fireman paused, then added in a whisper, And bones don’t melt or fly away."

The house’s head staff, a male gardener and female housekeeper, did not answer his question, as if they couldn’t hear it.

The fireman looked to his chief for help in bearing this bad news.

The chief was wringing his kerchief between soot-stained fingers, looking down at his shoes.

The fireman turned and watched the returning search party. Their boots stirred embers in rippling webs of orange and yellow.

Are you sure the lad couldn’t have outrun it? the young fireman again addressed the couple.

The man, who was grizzled and large-shouldered, held the woman with one arm as if she might fall over without it. A singed dressing gown hung on the man’s shoulders, and he wore a haggard face with a fierce, unreadable scowl. He gripped a garden hoe in his free hand, wielding it as if it were a battle spear.

When still none answered him, the fireman suggested, Is there a chance he might have escaped it?

The fire chief raised his head at last to glare at the fireman.

The housekeeper roused herself. Not a soul heard screams. Her voice grated in a dreadful whisper. A child burnt to death would surely have made a— She hid her face. The gardener leaned on his hoe and seemed to gaze at the firemen with white sightless eyes. Several members of the crew shifted with discomfort.

The young fireman dropped his gaze to the ashy grass under his boots. He’d not try again to offer hope for the impossible.

The disappearance might have been mysterious, but it was almost surely a tragedy. He held his tongue and wished he knew how to write a better ending to this story.

CHAPTER TWO

Ireland, 1958

Liam shut his book of fairy tales and pressed his head against the window of the motorcar. Several bends in the road had made him sick while reading. He sang quietly, eyes focused over the fields, and imagined his father playing his fiddle. He sang the song his father had written for him. It had a grander title, but Liam preferred to call it The Hero Song.

Seek him not on frothing shore

Seek him not on sweeping mead

To find a man of wondrous worth

You look, you say, for noblest birth

You hunt and quest through all green earth

And with some luck, you’ll find ’im!

Listen close on yonder hills, to hear his voice a-coming!

He speaks all truth, though high the cost

Songs dance a-leaping on his lips

He laughs at risk of dark and frost,

And with some luck you’ll find ’im!

Things will change for the better now, his mother had told him as they’d marched across the train platform. I’ll give you healthy, round meals, and you’ll not have to wear jumpers with patched elbows.

Liam had bitten back his comment that he’d never minded patches. It was his mother who’d found them unbearable. The life of poverty during her marriage to Liam’s father had been hard for her, but Liam had been too happy to notice. It all grew clear after his father died.

Dr. Harold Parker, the Englishman who had charmed Liam’s mother at a charity banquet organized by her widow’s group, quickly understood her hunger for fine and lovely things. He’d performed a hurried courtship with Liam’s mother and they’d married less than a year and a half after the death of Liam’s father. After the wedding, Dr. Parker spent only two nights in the flat with Liam and his mother, then vanished to make preparations for their move to the country. He insisted this move was vital for the continuance of his work. Liam assumed it had more to do with Dr. Parker’s disgrace at the English university, which had sent him to Ireland in the first place.

During the month in which Dr. Parker had gone ahead of them to arrange household matters, he sent Liam’s mother a cream-white silk scarf with a note instructing her to wear it on their journey out.

The morning they’d left, Liam had watched his mother’s sparkling smile as she’d wrapped the scarf around her neck in front of the little mirror over their sink. Liam wanted her to feel beautiful. He hoped her loneliness never returned. So he kept silent, and let her have her joy, even if the same thing that brought her happiness was what brought him misery.

Perhaps, if Dr. Parker had brought a child of his own into the marriage, it would have been different. Liam had lost his father, but at least he might have gained a brother or sister. Twelve years was a long time to wish for another sibling, and Liam still hadn’t given it up.

But Dr. Parker had no family left, and never spoke of his dead wife and daughter, though Liam knew they’d been taken by an illness. Dr. Parker was a widower and Liam’s mother was a widow. Perhaps it made them better for each other.

Now, with the train ride behind them, they’d met the driver that Dr. Parker had sent for them, and ridden in the motorcar until Liam’s mother asked to stop in town to purchase a few things.

Liam watched a sharp ray of sunlight slanting through the window. His father had read to him about a new battery that could be charged by just the sunlight. But what did it matter? He was moving to the countryside, where history went backwards. At least he’d have his books with him.

Liam chewed his lip as he pulled his pen box from his coat pocket, took out a small square of paper, and drew a bunch of wild lilies. They were his mother’s favorite. He laid the drawing in her empty seat and slid out a larger sheet with his half-finished map. Just as he’d smoothed it across his lap, his mother heaved open the car door and flung her parcels across the floor.

You’ll not take us here for shopping again, she instructed the driver as she dropped into her seat. Liam barely saved the lilies from being crushed.

The driver touched a gloved hand to his hat. Of course, ma’am. Though nowadays I suspect Dr. Parker will send along someone else for your errands.

The car pulled forward so quickly, Liam fell against his seat and lost hold of his pen. Glass rattled near his fingers as he groped below the seat. His knuckles brushed wood crates, deliveries for Dr. Parker that the driver must have collected before meeting them at the station. Liam peered at the crates with dread. They held a new Bunsen burner and several rows of beakers. There were also packets of powders, sealed multiple times for safety.

What happened at the store? Liam asked his mother.

I wanted to buy some tea that wasn’t in stock. I chose to pay with an account, to come fetch it later, she said. When I gave our address, one of the clerks asked if I was the new wife of the deranged chemist. That was the word he used. Deranged. And he had the cheek to say it to my face. Her voice trembled. He sneered at me.

I made you something. Liam handed her the drawing of the lilies, hoping to bring a smile.

She thanked him politely and tucked the drawing into her pocket, turning her eyes to the window.

Liam sighed and stroked Benson’s ears. The dog raised his scruffy head and made a half-hearted nuzzle into Liam’s palm. Arthritis made everything painful for the poor dog. His mix of golden retriever and collie heritage made his fur look wondrously wild, but now that he was old, Dr. Parker said it looked dirty and mismatched.

Liam stroked Benson again, then slid onto the car floor so that the dog could put his head in Liam’s lap. His mother stared out the window still. Perhaps she was trying to see the beloved towers of Dublin, long hidden behind the endless fields of grass and sheep and hedges that the train had dragged them through.

Liam hoped this new country life would treat her kindly. Leaving Dublin meant leaving behind lovely memories that would fade no matter how hard Liam fought against it, but his mother was eager for this departure, in spite of the fact that she’d been forced to leave behind her beloved piano.

She’d inherited it from her grandmother. It had forced them to hunt for ground-level flats, which was quite difficult, for the piano could not be moved up and down stairs, but they’d always found one. Liam’s father had traded work in exchange for a piano tuner’s services. Wedged inside their small lodgings, the piano’s top doubled as a bookshelf. Its bench was a surface for dough to rise, a desk for Liam, and occasionally a tea table. On special occasions, his mother played it alongside Liam’s father, who would play his fiddle, and nothing in the world sounded better than these duets.

And now, because Dr. Parker had deemed the piano run down and shabby, it would be left behind and donated to charity.

Liam could guess why his mother wanted to leave Dublin. Perhaps it was also why she’d left the piano behind. Each street corner of the city made her think of Tom Finley, the gardener who’d won her heart one rainy September afternoon while playing his fiddle on a street corner. She’d never minded his crushed foot, damaged by an artillery shell during the Second World War, not even when they’d danced together. She’d married him and given birth to Liam and they’d spent years together in more joy than Liam had words to say. And then she and Liam had lost him to influenza. Her loneliness had been painful and stifling. It had lasted for over a year, never getting much better, and then she’d met Dr. Harold Parker and married him as fast as she dared.

Liam’s mother had put all the hopes that she had left into their new home in County Wicklow.

Liam prayed for both their sakes they would truly start over, like little seeds sprouting up new leaves in the dirt.

***

Did you clean your nails like I asked? his mother asked as the motorcar pulled within sight of the house. He let her take his hands in hers and ignored her resigned sigh. Nothing to be done for it now, she said.

Dr. Parker’s letters had told them the house had six bedrooms and two dining halls. It looked twice as large as Liam had drawn it in his mind.

As soon as he noted the grandeur of the place, he felt certain they’d all be obliged to use the formal hall for every meal. This was how Dr. Parker preferred everything.

Liam stared down the line of rowan trees that bordered the drive to the house. From this distance, with the evening sun setting the windows aflame, it seemed to have more glass than the National Library in Dublin where Liam had spent every Saturday morning. In spite of the building’s spacious dominion, the forest beyond the house could have swallowed it all—brick chimneys, sweeping gables, and root cellar—in one easy gulp.

A woman in a pale green dress greeted them from the front steps, her dark hair wound in a silver-streaked braid on her head. By the time the car had pulled to a stop, Dr. Parker appeared on the porch. He was tugging off his gloves as if he’d come straight from the laboratory without stopping to wash up.

The driver opened the car door and the smell of chemicals clawed itself into Liam’s nose. Benson whined. Liam’s mother stepped out first and pulled Liam along with her. She kissed Dr. Parker on the cheek and then shook hands with the housekeeper, who was introduced to them as Mrs. Mallory, though she wore no ring on her finger.

The housekeeper gave them all permission to call her Hannah. Liam remembered that the title of Mrs. was one of those strange traditions in naming housekeepers, even if the woman had never had a husband. He smiled at Hannah, and thought she winked back, but she’d done it so quickly, he couldn’t be sure.

From the corner of his eye, Liam noticed a head poke around the house, partially screened by a column of ivy that wreathed a drainpipe. The head became a neck and shoulders, and soon became the lumbering lope of a man who leaned on a garden hoe as if it were his walking cane. As he approached, Liam noticed, with an icy shiver, that the man’s eyes were completely smooth and white, as if round stones had been traded for normal eyes.

Liam’s mother redirected his attention to Dr. Parker. Liam, greet your father. When Liam resisted, she pushed him forward. Reluctantly, he shook Dr. Parker’s hand.

The man’s skin was clammy. Liam imagined it sweating for hours inside a glove. He practiced impressive self-control by pulling away slowly.

The servants assisted with their luggage and Liam stopped and stood before the door. Great waves of wind swept around the house. He could think of nowhere in Dublin’s parks where he’d felt such freedom as this, except perhaps the wild bits of Phoenix Park, but those were a rare treat. He’d have the freedom