The Stones Remember What the Rain Forgets

He walks as winter walks: with creaking purpose,
His cloak the color of unpolished headstones,
Past meadows where buttercups once curtsied
To ladies whose laughter now feeds the worms.
Before him, teeth against the plum-dark sky,
The castle stands—not stands, but crouches,
A rheumatic hound too proud to fully collapse.

Twelve arches yawn with cobweb tonsils;
Staircases spiral like fossilized screams.
In the great hall, a chandelier’s skeleton
Ticks faintly when wind fingers its crystal scars.
He knows each stone’s nickname—
“Widow’s Sigh,” “The Bishop’s Blush,”
“Lionel” (for the boy who fell from parapets
Chasing a leathern ball in ’17).

Here, by the well that drank September rains
And spat back echoes, he digs brittle fingers
Into mortar wounds. “You promised,” whispers
The east tower through its arrow slit mouth.
“You promised,” hisses the moat’s last puddle,
A silver eye filming over with algae.

***

(Flashback in foxfire glow: two youths
Pressed against “The Kissing Stone”—so named
Not for romance, but the puckered bullet holes
From Cromwell’s men. Roland, all sunflower hair
And knuckles raw from sparring practice;
Edgar, the elder by three breaths, whose spine
Already bent beneath father-lore like ivy
Choking an oak. Their palms meet, sweat-glued,
Over a dagger’s hilt. “If war should part us—”
“Not if,” Roland laughs, plucking a dandelion
To blow its ghost into Edgar’s serious face.
“Swear anyway. Swear you’ll bring me home.”
Steel sings as Edgar draws the blade across
His palm—a scarlet grin. “Stone and water
Bear witness: I’ll retrieve you from any field,
Any flood, any fire. Or build our tomb here.”
The well gargles approval below.)

***

Decades unravel like a moth-eaten standard.
Edgar tends the castle’s heartbeat—keeps ledgers
Of wheat yields, mends the mill’s wooden joints,
Teaches Roland’s youngest to read Latin
From a psalter stained with mulberry juice.
War comes not as thunderclap, but as rot:
First the king’s men take the blacksmith,
Then the cooper, then the baker’s twins.
Roland rides out with May’s last lilacs
Tucked in his breastplate. “Save one bloom
For our victory wine,” he winks, forgetting
That roots won’t drink from armored soil.

Letters arrive like wounded sparrows—
Marston Moor’s mud-choked horror,
Naseby’s crimson harvest. Edgar counts
Each parchment crease as rosary beads,
Until the final dove falls, arrow-pierced:
“Brother—they say the flesh forgets its pain.
Lies. This ditch reeks of gangrene and regret.
Come before the crows teach me new litanies.”

***

Now the old man (for Edgar survived
By being bookish, by hiding in cellars
While Roland’s bones grew moss in ditches)
Scrapes lichen from the gatehouse. His knees
Punish him for outliving the chapel bell.
All night he wrestles shadows, reconstructing
Roland’s face from fragments—that chipped tooth
From when their stallion threw him, the scar
Like a tiny comet on his left earlobe.
Dawn finds him whispering to hearthstones:
“I looked, Roland. Swear I looked—
Every field from York to Gloucester,
Turned every corpse with my own hands
Till the villagers crossed themselves
And called me mad. What more…”

The castle answers in drips and drafts:
Through the solar’s cracked zodiac window,
A beam of dust-thick light points east
To the family crypt. His father’s effigy
Grips a sword; his mother’s hands
Are marble doves. Behind them—
A newer tomb. Edgar’s breath clots
In his throat. The date reads 1645.

“Lionel?” he croaks. The castle holds
Its silence like a butler withholding wine.
Then, from the well’s stony throat,
A boy’s voice bubbles: “When the soldiers came,
They needed proof our line was broken.
Uncle Roland’s bones were…convenient.”

***

Autumn’s sixth full moon finds Edgar
Kneeling in the sepulcher, a trowel
Trembling in his hand. The seventh coffin—
Smaller, light as a cradle—creaks open.
There, nestled in moth-eaten velvet:
A femur scored with swordplay nicks,
A skull Roland once cracked falling
From the apple tree, now home
To a family of woodlice. Edgar folds
Himself around the relics, a human reliquary,
Howling a sound that startles ravens
From their roosts three counties hence.

***

First frost etches the castle in glass.
Edgar, wrapped in tapestries looted
By time, climbs the broken stairs.
Each step chisels his lungs to dust.
At the tower’s crown, he arranges
His findings—a rib, two finger bones—
On the parapet. “See?” he rasps
To the horizon. “Home.”

The wind, ever a thief, snatches
The phalanx, carries it spinning
Down to the courtyard where Roland
Once carved their names inside a heart.
Edgar lunges, parchment skin tearing
On merlon teeth. For three heartbeats
He hovers—a frayed kite severed
From its string—then embraces
The earth like a long-lost rival.

***

Spring thaws the well’s last tear.
Shepherds whisper of a new ghost—
Not the wailing kind, but one who lifts
Fallen fledglings to their nests, whose hands
Glimmer faintly when moonlight strikes
The hidden tomb. The castle, patient spider,
Weaves ivy over the family crypt’s mouth.
Two names surface on an oak’s bark—
Not carved, but grown, as if the tree itself
Remembered what the rain forgot.