A Faire to Remember

An idle fantasy with whispers of truth.

An old woman opens the sliding glass door on the patio of a one-bedroom apartment on the ground floor of a complex with exclusively senior clientele. The Black Watch plaid of her long-sleeved, floor-length flannel lounger brings out the blue in eyes still bright behind rimless bifocals. Long brown hair, now streaked with gray -- wisdom highlights, she calls them -- is carelessly tied back with a scarf. Her feet are shod in blue fur-lined slippers. With one hand, she clutches a black woolen shawl around her shoulders. In the other hand she carries a thick case-bound book with raised hubs along the spine. The red leather cover is decorated with an ornate gold-stamped heart.

 

With cautious steps, she shuffles over to a cushioned settee flanked by two glass-topped tables and lowers herself carefully to a seat in the sunlight. She surveys the courtyard. Just this morning, the landscaping crew arrived for their first visit of the season, and the air is redolent with the fragrance of fresh cut grass. Across the way, a squirrel and a blue jay engage in a noisy territorial dispute over a neighbor’s bird feeder. The high-strung pit bull terrier belonging to her neighbor upstairs watches from his window and barks at anyone with the audacity to pass within view. It’s a pleasant, sunny day, one that’s been too long in coming.

 

For a moment she sits with her eyes closed and her face lifted toward the sun. The warmth feels good to her old, perpetually aching bones. The vernal equinox is only a few days away and the weather has been getting warmer, but it’s been a long winter for her, and she always seems to feel cold these days. “Maybe I’m anemic,” she thinks. “I probably need to start taking Geritol.” Then she wonders, “Do they even make that stuff anymore?”

 

She briefly allows herself to indulge in a modicum of self-pity. She never wanted to be growing old alone, a spinster who’d outlived her family and many of her far-flung friends. She didn’t intend to remain single, yet somehow a part of her always suspected she would. “Inclination never coincided with opportunity,” she always said, and now it was too late. That ship sailed years ago -- and went down with all hands. She sighs heavily. She feels used up, worn out, and useless, just waiting for it all to end.

 

Shaking her head in a half-hearted attempt to rouse herself from her funk, she opens the book on her lap. Instead of the printed pages of a novel, the book is filled with line after line of the woman’s own neat and careful script. She’s been a diarist for most of her life, and this volume chronicles her visits to an autumn Renaissance Festival when she was still a young woman in her twenties.

 

Renaissance festivals were part cosplay, part historical reenactment, and part patrons wanting to act out their D&D fantasies. She was a veteran of a Renaissance fair herself. In her much younger days, nearly half a century ago, she’d been in the cast of a smaller local fair, and she’d made lasting friends -- many of whom were no longer around. She sighed. “That’s the way of the world,” she thought. “The further you travel down the road of life, the more the milestones change to tombstones.”

 

As she turns each page, the years and the miles roll away and she can see friends from her past as they once were. She can hear the music she loved, hear the craftspeople and food vendors hawking their wares. She remembers browsing the shops for handmade clothing, jewelry, and artwork. She remembers the shows: a sword swallower, the jugglers, the minstrels, and sword fighting comedy. The swordplay was her favorite, and she remembers a certain “French” swordsman -- a Texas actor in reality -- who ultimately captured her heart.

 

So many times, she’d watched her Frenchman cross swords with his partner, The Spaniard, in a demonstration of 17^th century swordplay that rivaled anything committed to celluloid in Hollywood’s Golden Age. Most of the shows were light-hearted, the humor irreverent, but her favorite show had always been the dramatic rapier and dagger duel in which she marveled at her friend’s acting chops as well as his fencing skills.

 

While she reads, her eyelids begin to grow heavy. The sun feels good, and she finally begins to feel warm. In a moment, she begins to drowse, rousing once or twice before her chin drops forward onto her chest and she surrenders to sleep. The book slides from her lap onto the pavement by her slippered feet. Her hands fall limp at her sides.

 

Where the book has fallen, a snapshot has slipped from the pages into view. It’s a picture of a couple, obviously taken at the Renaissance Festival. The gentleman is tall and lean with warm brown eyes, chestnut hair, wearing a mustache, and goatee. He’s handsome, and his cheeky grin clearly says that he’s aware of it, but not obnoxiously so. His smile is more playful than smug. Wearing the red velvet doublet of a Cavalier, he looks as though he’d stepped out of Alexander Salkind’s production of The Three Musketeers.

 

The voluptuous young woman in the photograph is shorter than the gentleman, the top of her head on a level with his heart. Her long brown hair is the color of ancient copper in the sunlight, and her blue eyes shine with happiness. She’s wearing a tightly-laced black bodice over a white chemise. Her full, rust-colored skirt completes her costume. Closer inspection reveals that the young girl in the photograph is none other than the old woman as she looked 50 years ago. The young girl and her swordsman are wrapped in a loving embrace, their arms around each other, both beaming with contentment.

 

The old woman startles awake, not because of any sudden noise but because of the lack of it. The blue jay and the squirrel must've reached a détente, and the pit bull has probably left his sentry post for his evening bowl of kibble. For once, even her neighbors are silent. No sounds of radio, television, or traffic mar the stillness. The shadows have lengthened toward twilight, and there seems to be no one around. "I guess I fell asleep," she thinks.

 

She realizes the journal has fallen from her lap and bends down to retrieve it along with the photograph. Gazing at the familiar face, she strokes it with her fingertips and smiles. "Love of my life," she whispers.

 

Her heart gives a little syncopated skip, and she senses a presence. A black leather-gauntleted hand rests gently on her shoulder. “Good evening, my darling,” a deep, masculine voice murmurs close to her ear.

 

She looks up to see the Cavalier from the photograph standing beside her. Wearing a plumed musketeer’s hat, he’s booted and spurred, wearing a baldric and sword. He looks just as she remembers him, and she smiles happily. “I am asleep, and now I’m dreaming,” she thinks. This thought does not surprise her. She often has lucid dreams or dreams of past loved ones.

 

He sweeps off his hat and makes a courtly bow. Taking her hand, he kisses it. “Bonsoir, my dear.”

 

Pure joy suffuses her aged face. “You’re just as handsome as I remember,” she says as she pats the bench beside her and beckons him to sit down. “This is how I always think of you, the way you looked when we met.”

 

Removing his hat, baldric and sword, and gauntlets, he lays them aside on the end table and obliges. Settling beside her, he rests his arm on the back of the settee around her shoulders and stretches out his long legs, crossing them at the ankles -- carefully to avoid gouging himself with his own spurs.

 

She takes his other hand in hers. “How kind of you to visit,” she says. “I’ve been thinking of you so much lately.”

 

“I know, my love,” he says, his voice almost a purr. “That’s why I came.”

 

“I’m afraid you’re not catching me at my best,” she says, releasing his hand and smoothing her hair nervously. “Father Time has not been terribly kind.”

 

He regards her with a look of adoration. “You’ve always been beautiful to me,” he assures her.

 

“And you’ve always been a charmer, my love.” She looks wistful for a moment. “You were the only man who ever called me beautiful and made me believe it. I was never a beauty you know,” here he opens his mouth to protest, but she silences him with a finger to his lips. “I was a wide-eyed wallflower, a conscientious objector in the sexual revolution, and you were the first man to really flirt with me -- a sweet, playful kind of flirtation. For the first time in my life, you made me feel beautiful, desirable, and desired, and I will forever bless you for it.”

 

She sighs, “I love when you visit my dreams,” she says. “It gives me the opportunity to say all those things I was afraid to say when we were together.”

 

He is curious, “We’ve been friends almost since the moment we met. Surely you knew there was nothing you couldn’t say to me.”

 

She regards him with a sad smile. “I was afraid to admit how much I really cared for you because a nice, well-brought up young lady doesn’t blurt out her feelings to a handsome man, especially when she’s pretty sure those feelings are not returned in kind!”

 

He opens his arms to her, and she moves closer. Her arms readily encircle his waist, his arms enfold her in a tender embrace. She rests her head on his chest, against his gallant heart, as she’d done so often, so many years ago. “How do you know I didn’t return your feelings in kind?” he asks.

 

She pretends to consider his question. “Hmm, let me see. I think watching you marry someone else was a big giveaway,” she retorts, giving him a playful swat on his well-muscled thigh. “I really did love your wife, by the way,” she adds, looking up at him and growing serious.

 

“I know you did, and I loved you for it,” he replies.

 

“She was so kind to me -- even when she had every right not to be. Most women would not have been so generous to the kid with a crush on her husband, but she was a saint. I loved her because you loved her. And I loved her because she made you happy.”

 

“I always knew how you felt,” he said.

 

“You would have had to be blind and deaf not to,” she rejoined. “But as long I didn’t admit my true feelings, I could go on pretending that we were just friends. Oh, I cherished your friendship! I would have died rather than see anything threaten that. You were too important to me.”

 

He squeezes her affectionately, “I’m crazy about you, you know.”

 

She sat back so she could gaze into his dark eyes. “And you know that feeling is mutual.” She touches his cheek with her wrinkled hand. “I know you loved me. You told me often enough -- and I never tired of hearing it. I promise you; I remember and cherish every tender word you ever said to me. I even wrote them down,” she indicates the book in her lap. “Every so often I go back and read about the time we had together just to assure myself that you really did care, that your affection was genuine and not something I conjured up from the whole cloth of my own wishful thinking.”

 

“I assure you my affection is genuine. It might’ve started out as just another bit with a nameless patron. That was my shtick, part of my role as the French lover. I flirted with all the ladies, but you were different. You were so ingenuous and open. I got to know you, and I knew your heart was not to be trifled with.

 

“You treated my heart very tenderly,” she allows. “Much kinder than any of the others.”

 

He reacts with mock horror. “Fickle jade! Do you mean there were others besides me?” But he’s smiling, even as he poses the question.

 

“Only two before I met you,” she confesses. “And one after you married.” She punctuates the word ‘married’ with a playful poke to his chest. “They treated my poor heart very ill, and I took it back tout de suite!”

 

He smiles at her use of the French phrase. “You remember when I invited you to the wedding, I asked you if my getting married would hurt our friendship?”

 

She nods. “And you remember I told you it never would? You could’ve told me you were planning to start a harem, and I wouldn’t have loved you any less,” she declares with a smile.

 

She looks up at him. “Did you know that yours was the only ‘I love you’ that ever mattered to me? I knew you loved me, but I also knew you were never in love with me. It didn’t matter, though. I cherished our friendship so much that I would’ve taken it on any terms. It was a friendship that defied even our own efforts to categorize it. Never lovers but something more than friends, ours was a bond of unconditional love, freely given and freely received, each expecting nothing of the other, of ‘respect and joy in each other’s life’ to quote Richard Bach.”

 

“That’s a good way to put it,” he says.

 

“You stole my heart the first time I saw you, you charming rascal.” She thinks for a moment, “Oh, that’s not really true. My heart was yours for the asking. Indeed, I gave it to you without the asking when I was 24 years old, and I’ve never wanted it back. You took such excellent care of it. My dear old love, I adored you from the moment I met you, and I shall adore you for the rest of my life.”

 

“As I’ve adored you,” he replies. “You were so young and so guileless. I tried to treat the heart you gave me as the treasure I knew it was.”

 

“Oh, I fell so totally and irrevocably in love with you all those years ago,” she says with a slightly rueful shake of her head. “Truth be told, I really fell in love with your character and my idea of you, but through the years, as I got to know you better, my crush deepened into a sincere and abiding affection for the man who created the character, the man who was my friend.”

 

She settles into his embrace once more as they begin to talk and reminisce about days long gone by. They express their mutual affection and admiration for each other until the twilight shadows lengthen into dusk and sunset starts to paint the horizon in shades of fiery orange and red.

 

“I spent so many happy hours watching you cross swords with your partner,” she observes with a satisfied sigh. “I thrilled to those displays of skill and acrobatics even while I laughed at the jokes. You were such a showman.”

 

“And I thrilled to know you were in the crowd watching. You were my own personal talisman, my good luck charm. We theater folk are a superstitious lot, you know,” he adds with a rueful grin.

 

He gives her a squeeze and disengages himself from her embrace. She frowns as she watches him stand up and don his baldric and sword, hat, and gauntlets. “It’s late, my love,” he says gently. “It’s time to go.”

 

“So soon?” she asks. “I always hated saying goodbye to you. It tore the heart right out of me.” She favors him with a resigned smile, “But it’s been lovely to see you again. I hope you’ll visit me again soon.”

 

There’s a twinkle in his dark eyes, and he extends his gauntleted hand toward her. “Come with me, beloved.”

 

His request has taken her by surprise. She gives a delighted laugh and places her hand in his, letting him raise her gently to her feet. “I’ve always said that If you ever made me that offer, I’d go with you and never look back.”

 

His arm encircles her shoulders as they begin to walk away together. “You can look back if you want, my love,” he whispers. “There’s nothing back there to be afraid of.”

 

Her brow furrows in puzzlement and she takes a cautious peek over her shoulder.

 

For a moment, she doesn’t understand what she’s seeing. Then she gasps, and her eyes widen as it all begins to makes sense. She’s looking at herself. It’s no longer nightfall, and the sun is still shining, just as it was. The squirrel and blue jay are still squabbling, and the pit bull continues to bark. The old woman appears to be sleeping, her chin resting on her the breast of her robe, a breast that has ceased to rise and fall.

 

She looks up at her handsome Cavalier. “I’m not sleeping, am I?” she asks.

 

“No, my love,” he replies gently.

 

“And this isn’t a dream, is it?”

 

“No, my love.”

 

She looks down and sees that she’s wearing the costume from the photograph. She holds out her hands. They are no longer the spotted and wrinkled hands of an old woman but the young, smooth hands of the girl who once fell in love with a handsome swordsman.

 

She places her hand in his once more. “What will happen to her?” she asks.

 

“She’ll be all right, I promise. A neighbor will be along soon,” he assures her.

 

She nods absently, and then looks up at him again. “Where are we going?” she asks.

 

“Where we’ll never have to say goodbye again,” he says as he bends down and kisses her tenderly.

 

Finis

Reviews

[Arti]

Hi,
An answered prayer, perfect answering when the time heeds what god has not revealed the prayer blessings but showed a promise of him in the answering of his prayer which he couldn't get the time, but god has told it was the time on clock we were waiting.

The first story of 🌹 date you revealed and the last date 🌹 of promise.

Now I realised never say marry but just offered me to come 🏡 home, I was not knowing where is our 🏡 home, I never thought how I would come without knowing address. I was thinking do we need to marry as we are in bond like the two snakes in logo of doctors clinic.


How I missed you hided you only you know, time has passed I am feeling like I am 50 when I see 46 as my age. Can I make you happy atleast serving mom and you? Or just we 3 go home 🏠.

Usha/Jessy Jacob.

[Lara]

Such a lovely story. So beautifully told, too!
I sense a great amount of care put into this writing...

I really, really like this!
I should want to revisit and read over and again.

[Yaakovashoshana]

Thank you for your kind words. If I had all of Shakespeare's eloquence at my command, I still couldn't do justice to my handsome swashbuckler. Yes, he is a real person, and we've been dear friends for over four decades.