by M. J. Logue
Thomazine wasn’t quite sure how she felt about her childhood friend being the first dead man she’d ever seen.
She wasn’t quite sure he was dead, either, but he certainly looked it currently.
He was so thin, and it wasn’t how she remembered him. Thin, and sort of mangy-looking, with his hair cropped almost to his scalp – but raggedly, as if he’d done it himself with a pair of shears and no mirror – and that horrible thing on his cheek gone all bluish-purple and sore-looking with the cold.
He didn’t look very nice to know, actually. And Thomazine wasn’t sure which was worse, that he looked like a dead person, or that he looked like a very intimidating dead person, because neither of them sat well with her memory of a young man she’d used to share her ill-gotten sweetmeats with, on the stairs in the dark. He had been the most glamorous, fascinating thing in the world she could conceive, then. He’d spent most of his lieutenant’s pay on wildly unsuitable gifts for her, having no other family of his own: the vivid scarlet of the length of wool he’d bought at her childish insistence one Christmas was still in use about the house, somewhere. (Nell had had the wear of that scarlet gown, even, though it had looked better on dark-haired Nell than it ever had on amber-haired Thomazine.)
She had loved him very, very much, when she was toddling – like a dog, or a good horse, she would have followed at his heel through the gates of Hell, all unbidden. She did not know what might have happened to make that brave, bright, half-beautiful boy into this dreadful starved beggar. It was the first tragedy she had known in her comforted and beloved life, and it felt as if a little window had opened into darkness – that it might happen to someone she had loved, in spite of the strength of her loving, frightened her.
She was still staring at him, trying to work out if that shaking hiss was the sound of sleet on the black window-glass or just his painful breathing, when her mother came in.
“Thomazine, dear,” Het said gently, from the doorway.
And by some small miracle his eyes opened, and he was not dead: he looked like the worst of cut-throat beggars but her old friend was still in there, somewhere.
“Thom. A. Zine?” he whispered, and blinked, frowned slightly, and then his eyes slid over her shoulder to her mother.
“Het?”
Who took a step into the room. Thomazine’s eyes flew to that solid, familiar shape in the doorway, for where her mother was everything would be all right, and no harm could befall them. “Yes, dear. You are safe home, and it wants but three days to Christmas, and we have missed you a good deal,” Het said.
And she sounded so happy that Thomazine did not understand why her mother’s eyes sparkled with tears.
