Free A Wounded Name (Fiction - Young Adult) by Dot Hutchison

with no electricity.
    Hamlet offered to run power out there for him, but Jack refused.
    He isn’t easy to find, but everywhere I walk I can see the careful tending that says he’s been through recently. The roses are pruned back, some of them tied to the delicate trellises that separate the paths; the weeds have been pulled, the soil loose where their roots clung.
    He worships my mother, and I’ve never been sure why. Even now, over seven years after her death, he tends the flowers on her grave and on the island in the center of the lake, continues to bring me flowers every morning as he did when she was alive. I asked Mama once if he was in love with her, and she laughed so brightly, I almost felt ashamed of the question, but then she gathered me close and buried her face in my hair and told me there were all kinds of love. It wasn’t really an answer, but then, what could I expect when I’d asked the wrong question?
    I finally find him in a sunny alcove, on his knees in the grass to transplant violets in a great ring about the space. The stone bench is more a chaise, a low stone couch with one high curved end for support. This was Hamlet’s favorite spot in the gardens, with a view of both the house and the lake, and his afternoon reading often turned into a nap in the sunlight.
    And it was where he died, where Jack found him lifeless and warm. Gertrude didn’t want an autopsy or blood tests, didn’t want the doctors cutting into her husband’s body. As ever, the local authorities were deferential to a fault where the Academy was concerned, so the coroners examined him as best they could and said it must have been a heart attack despite there being no warnings of it in his last physical. Such things can happen, they said, especially in stressful jobs, even though Hamlet was perhaps young for such spontaneous failure.
    Jack grunts a greeting as he lowers a plant into the waiting hole, the roots carefully cupped in his gnarled fingers. He doesn’t look away or pause, intent on his task.
    I sit down on the very edge of the bench, my skin crawling with memory, and wait.
    He isn’t one for talking. I was almost five before he ever said anything to me, and that was just a warning not to play in the lake until I knew how to swim. When Mama was gone on her frequent flights, her escapes from the gilded cage of the Academy grounds, I followed Jack around the gardens with an endless stream of chatter, parroting Mama’s stories of the Wild Hunt and the faeries that danced in the stone rings and the bells that rang in the lake.
    Then one day, he sat back on his heels, studied me for so long I wanted to fidget and squirm, and then handed me a trowel and showed me how to gently dig around the roots of a plant that needed to be moved. He’d always tolerated my presence before that, as he tolerated Laertes, but from that day on, I was truly my mother’s daughter in his eyes, something that pleases him as much as it terrifies my father.
    Sometimes I wonder if there will ever be a time when I’m not defined by my mother, but I do it as much to myself as anyone else.
    Finally, all the violets have moved from the pots to the beds that ring the clearing and Jack’s blue eyes flick to me as he paces the perimeter with a dented, battered watering can. “Penny, Miss Ophelia.”
    “I’ve been thinking of the Headmaster,” I answer, and the wealth of lines around his eyes deepen.
    “I suspect most of us have.”
    “Tell me about when you found him?”
    He shakes his head in time with the gentle shakes of the watering can that ensures no plant is hit too hard with the falling liquid. “Can’t be any good in that.”
    I watch him sprinkle the last of the water, the can stacked neatly beside his other tools when he’s done. Jack always knows more than he says. I don’t even remember when I learned that, if it was something I realized over time or if my mother told me once, but he always knows more than he says. Jack sees more