Summary: Penelope loves the house, although sometimes her mother complains that it’s too small and too isolated. She loves the bookshelves with the books that her father reads her as bedtime stories when he is here, and she loves the fields around house, especially the small plot that her mother has dedicated as Penelope’s garden, where she waters wildflowers and weeds.
Or: Miranda is pregnant when they flee London, and their daughter grows quick and wild on New Providence.
“Thou are come, Telemachus, a sweet
light in the dark; methought I should see thee never again after thou hadst
gone in thy ship to Pylos.”The Odyssey, Book XVI
Her earliest memory is of her
father.In it, he sits at the kitchen table,
outlined by the dim, warm light of the oil lamp on the counter. The sheath of a
sword lies on the table, the battered leather almost blending into the wood. He
holds the sword itself in his hands, going over the blade of it with a cloth,
again and again in a mesmerizing rhythm. She watches, caught in the doorway.He pauses after a moment, turns, and
smiles at her in a way that her mother tells her he smiles only ever for her.
“Penelope, what are you doing out of bed?”“Had a bad dream,” she mumbles.
She waits for him to put the sword
down. However young she is in the memory, she knows better than to approach her
father while he still holds a weapon. He would never hurt her, but somehow, he
seems different with a blade in his hands, as if there is a slightly different
man who inhabits his skin.
a sweet light in the dark
Published
Meg's Mumbles 