NOIR-vember_THE STRANGE LIFE OF LUCY WENTWORTH

 

The Lakota Sioux call me the Turquoise Woman, the cursed Samuel McCord has come to call me Mother.

You two-leggeds sometimes call me Mother Nature.

The colors of my thoughts are the Northern Lights.

I see men come; I see them go, crawling like ants on the rocky surface of my skin.

One such life stands out from the snow and ice of most two-leggeds, for its touch vibrated through me like a responsive echo from a distant star.

Lucille Wentworth.

Her parents killed by craven Thuggees in India, my adopted son, Samuel whom I call Damayi (Eagle in Apache) saved her,

And for his efforts was promptly jailed by her grandfather, a stiff-necked British Major.

The reason is tedious and senseless, something to do with my son having compassion on both sides of the accursed Opium War in China.

You have already heard of her meeting with the undead Abigail Adams.

You can read more of it in my son’s account, THE STARS BLEED AT MIDNIGHT.

What you do not know is that some seasons later, that carrion Adams took the girl under her wing, seeing her as something as a daughter substitute.

The girl flew across the Atlantic and Europe in the fabled sky-ship, Xanadu, with my son and Mark Twain …

which you can read for yourself in THE NOT-SO-INNOCENTS ABROAD and THE NOT-SO-INNOCENTS AT LARGE.

The vampire leader kept her appetite under control for a time, taking the girl to the world’s capitols and trying to see the world through the eyes of innocence.

As I said, it worked … for a time … until Lucy grew into a stunning woman and so, in the eyes of that carrion-queen went from beloved pet to … food.

Fortunately, in earlier seasons, my son had the girl tutored in self-defense by experts from around the world.

Not so fortunate was Abigail Adams.

But being already dead, that carrion-queen found a way to continue to make life needlessly violent for my grandson, Victor Standish.

Lucy’s was a life of pathos, contradictions, crushed dreams, and spirited determination much like the narratives of your penny dreadfuls.

In Cairo, Egypt, Lucy met the man who would one day be so bold as to ask her to marry him: Winston Churchill.

You may read more of that in my son’s account, THE STARS BLEED AT MIDNIGHT.

In the upcoming, SAME AS IT NEVER WAS, you may read of Lucy’s nightmarish experience upon Omaha Beach courtesy of that uninvited squatter, Sentient.

She and I will one day have an accounting. I feel it.

I should regret the tremors Lucy Wentworth’s travails caused her, but the sound of it was too beautiful to sully with recriminations.

Does the melody of your life bring beauty or boredom I wonder?