Chapter Text
Debussy, Lent. (Melancolique et Doux)
The morning had been dawning on the English for only a few hours, and it was predictable that this would have been the classic, not even close, English, dreary, gray day of early November, nothing worth pining for, in short. Well, almost nothing, to be precise.
The whitewash from the sky cast a sickly light on the small bedroom and the white sheets of the crib, which her little owner had taken care to kick off as soon as she woke up. Therefore she had vigorously rotated her head to one side and the other in search of someone who could help her free herself from her prison, but the adults seemed to be busy with who knows what vital things she did not understand, and this annoyed her not a little.
She therefore looked up at the top of the wooden bars that separated her from the world, and down to look at her chubby little hands, and thought that whatever event the grown-ups were participating in, she wanted to be part of it like any self-respecting now grown-up child.
She grasped the top with all ten fingers and forced herself upright on the mat: definitely the world looked better without those obnoxious brown stripes, but it was not enough. Levering his arms, she lifted one leg and crossed it over the side of the crib, trying to push himself with his own little big body outward. She bent the other leg as well, swung it over the wood as she had done with the first, and… hey presto! With one finished jump to the ground and a tiny thud with her butt she had made it, she was free to go explore the adult world! Sure, the backside hurt a little, but freedom was too good to cry about, so she took to crawling across the cold floor of the room, lifting her aquamarine eyes to her second obstacle: the closed door.
Just as she was puffing out her cheeks in disappointment this one opened and a pair of shiny shoes topped with galoshes stood between her and the rest of the house. Two brown eyes lowered on her, and two lithe hands did their best to lift her off the ground.
“Elizabeth!” the man exclaimed, turning a worried glance at the empty crib, “How did you get down from there?”
The child gave him a toothless, mischievous smile, then pointed her index finger outward by protruding her whole torso to instill more emphasis on her own desire for exploration.
“All right, all right, I get it, let’s go to mom Erina, shall we? No tantrums though, or I’ll tell Straitso,” murmured the adult with the little runaway in his arms, swelling his voice to mimic a playfully threatening tone, “if you’re a good little lady I’ll introduce you to another child.”
Elizabeth had not fully grasped the meaning of those words, but she guessed that they were related to the big event that had kept the adults in the house busy, so she demonstrated her excitement by clinging to the man’s jacket and lisping a few verses of contentment as they walked down the hallway in the direction of solving the mystery.
“Let’s see... may we enter?” three light strokes of the knuckle tapped on the wood, which was followed by a delicate woman’s muffled voice from within.
“We can come in!” he said to the little girl “Good morning Mrs. Joestar, and good morning to you too little George! We come to reassure ourselves of your health, if it does not inconvenience you.”
The windows of this other bedroom filtered the same whitish light with which the little girl had awakened. The puerpera sat up in bed with her back lying on beautiful pillows as white as her embroidered robe and her hands on her still swollen womb, tired from the labors of childbirth but glad to receive that visit. Next to her was another crib, smaller than the one reserved for Elizabeth, screened by a canopy that was also white.
“Good morning Mr. Speedwagon, you never disturb. Make yourself comfortable.”
“Thank you, you are an angel” the visitor made reverence with a short bow and cautiously approached the crib “while waiting for daddy Straitso to come and retrieve this little rebel we would like to keep you some company. May we introduce ourselves to the new Joestar?”
“Permission granted, but only if Elizabeth comes here afterwards to be looked at... I want to see how much she has grown,” was Erina’s reply, sketching another smile in the child’s direction.
“Oh, certainly... Look, Elizabeth. This is George.”
Barely peeling back the veil with the help of an outstretched finger, the man and the little girl leaned out to admire yet another but always wonderful miracle of nature: a round, handsome face framed by dark curls rested quietly in its own silken nest, with its little fists closed on its chest and his tiny eyes about to close for their first morning nap.
“He looks so much like him… so little and already without a father,” were the first words out of his mouth as he clumsily tried to hold back the frown he had been carrying inside since the night before.
Erina, who always knew when her friend was prey to sudden fits of emotion, pointed to the armchair at the foot of the bed.
“Robert, why don’t you give me Elizabeth and sit down? I guess you didn’t get any sleep last night either.”
Speedwagon silently granted the request and, once sunk into the velvet, took off his hat revealing his blond mop, covered his face with his hands and began to sob.
“I’m sorry, I’m really sorry,” he managed to say between sobs, “I’m so happy to hear that Jonathan’s son is okay, but at the same time I can’t help being sad that he’s gone! He deserved… you deserved happiness, you deserve happiness, Erina! How cruel fate can be if a child who has not yet seen his first sunset is doomed to never know his daddy… The best man in this world?”
“My dear Speedwagon, if all human beings had a friend like you, wickedness would no longer exist,” said Erina, who in the meantime had clasped Elizabeth to her breast and gently placed her lips on her forehead, “we cannot contravene the laws of fate since we are only human beings, however, there is one thing about which I would like to contradict you: George may have been born without Jonathan, but he was not born without a father ready to love him.”
Speedwagon lifted his head and wiped his face as best he could with the sleeve of his jacket, still wincing from sobs. For a moment he crossed his gaze with the woman’s, but quickly averted it to an unspecified spot to his right.
“I don’t… I don’t think I deserve the praise you give me. However, if you grant me the honor of helping you raise your son, it will be my endeavor to see that he grows up in the best way possible; I will tell him about his father and what he did for me, because I want his memory not to fade.”
“Just as it is an honor for me to have known you.”
That statement was greeted with religious stillness on the part of the former criminal, who struggled mightily to regain some semblance of composure. They then remained silent for a minute, or perhaps a little longer, who knew, enjoying the muffled peace of that cold day outside but warm and restorative in their spirits, interrupted only by Elizabeth’s fiddling with the laces of Erina’s robe. And indeed it was she who took up the floor again.
“Do you know that you are really beautiful?” he whispered to her, as he traced the outline of her pretty nose with the tip of her index finger, triggering a silvery laugh in the little girl “Beautiful and restless, when you grow up you will have your beautiful personality.”
“I don’t know how she did it, but I found her outside her crib before, she must have climbed over it all by herself!” revealed Speedwagon with a note of apprehension in that exclamation “She could have been hurt.”
“Yes, she would have...” repeated Erina absentmindedly, losing herself for a moment in the sea-blue of those eyes so clear, as only those of a newborn baby coming into life could be. Elizabeth could not realize how immensely fortunate she was to still possess the wild genuineness of little children who want to discover everything and for whom it is all fun, and she would never have done so, as a good and riotous little girl. Like the water that stuck to the upside-down glass during playtimes with her foster daddy.
She would not have remembered them, but they would have told her.
Like little George would have been told about his father.