"Seven Years’ Hard Labour" (221b, Character Death, September 2016 Prompt)

[gardnerhill.livejournal.com]

Title: Seven Years’ Hard Labour
Author: gardnerhill
Form/Wordcount: 221b
Characters/Pairings: Mycroft Holmes, Violet Holmes, Siger Holmes
Rating: G
Warnings/Content: Death ahead.
Summary: Victorian women only wished they had the rights given to prison convicts.
Author’s Notes: For the Holmes Minor September prompt: Seven.

***

He wanted a normal son – not the one he’d gotten.

Even as an infant the boy looked at everything, eyes open, and spoke before he could walk. His favourite word, “Why?” soon drove Siger into impotent rage. The prodigy he had sired and I had borne frightened him and when he was frightened he beat all of us. (Even then, through my lad’s tears of pain, would come another “Why?” – this one, to ask a reason for his father’s cruelty.)

Another child, an ordinary one, please God, to still his hand and his words.

It was not to be. I miscarried nearly a dozen times.

“No baby, Mummy,” my boy would say – not to state the obvious but to beg me to stop. I could feel myself wearing away with every involuntary abortion.

I was fated to be wed till death to a brute. But if only I could stop his brutality against his own child I would bear it all with serenity.

This one. This one feels the way the first one did – strong, thriving, enduring. If this one takes every bit of my will and life force to bring to term, so be it.

Such an ordinary-looking baby. A sweet final sight – better than the tear-filled eyes of little Mycroft beholding his new brother and his mother’s last breath.