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The old man looks endearingly into Roderick’s eyes and embraces him. He then turns around and walks toward the road running by the property where a carriage and driver are ready to take him away. He pauses at the edge of the walkway, glancing back to view his longtime home for one last time.
The countless memories this place holds appear before him, seemingly all at once. Feelings of joy and excitement, of sorrow, fear, and the pain of loss, all come together in an apparatus of emotion that he cannot put words to. Tears fall from his eyes. He does nothing to hold them back or wipe them away. Doing so, he believes, would be to deny the meaning and power of his relationships with those he loved. After a moment, he is finally ready to depart and enters the carriage, disappearing beyond the horizon.
Roderick immediately longs to see him again. Although he was in his company only a couple of times, the peace that radiated from the old man was something his life had been missing for many years, and he could already sense its absence. His father was not a warm person. He taught Roderick a lot about the world and making his way in it, but his sudden abandonment of Roderick and his mother left a lingering coldness in its wake.
The days come and go calmly for Roderick, who is surprised to find how easily he acclimates to the peaceful countryside. He tries to keep himself busy during the day, searching for new ways to expand the trading company and create more aggressive strategies for it, but there is only so much he is able to do for the time being. Consequently, he spends much of his time reading books and reflecting in the manor.
He finds it enjoyable to wander its many halls and rooms and reinvent them in his mind. Having found small ways to help the trade company grow slightly, he feels that it is only a matter of time before he will have the funds necessary to do a number of renovations to give the estate a more personal feel, a place to create his own memories in.
Early one evening a month later, he is surprised by a knock at his front door. The people in town seem to have taken kindly to him, but none of them have expressed a desire to visit him in his home. He rushes toward the entranceway excitedly. When he opens the door, however, he doesn’t find someone from town but instead a striking woman who appears a little bit confused at Roderick’s presence.
“My name is Alba,” she offers, a flutter of nervousness in her voice.
He wonders if perhaps she is seeking the old man, but that is not the case at all. She is, as a matter of fact, looking for a Roderick at this very estate, but the old man who had sent her this way had failed to mention that Roderick was also young and handsome.
Roderick is also taken aback by her and does not offer a courteous greeting in response, though he probably should. He is not used to visitors or the etiquette demanded when a guest comes to the door, and so he smiles and waits for her to go on.
“I’m looking for a man named Roderick. I was told I could find him here.”
“Well that is me, would you like to come in?”
She sighs with relief and steps inside the warm home and away from the chilly, late-fall air. Some sense of politeness coming to his mind, Roderick offers to take her coat, and then leads her inside to a room with a fireplace along with soft furniture. Before he sits down with her, however, he retreats to the kitchen where he retrieves a warm drink, walking back into the room and handing it to her. She excitedly presses it to her lips.
“It’s delicious,” Alba exclaims. “What’s in it?”
“A number of things,” Roderick proudly explains. “It’s something I came up with after tiring of the same things. It’s part cider, part spice, and part tea.”
“I think you’re onto something here.”
She grins playfully as she says it, but then she tries to put on a straighter face when he smiles back. It’s been a long time since she’s been alone with a man, and she doesn’t ever seem to find the company of the right sort. It’s for that reason that she usually keeps her guard up. It was down because she’d expected Roderick to be old, but she knows that she probably will be best off being much more distant from this point forward, even though deep down, she longs for someone to become close to.
“You’re probably wondering what I’m doing here,” she says, much more seriously and directly this time.
“Yeah, but I wasn’t in a big hurry to find out. I knew you’d get there eventually,” he teases.
Unlike Alba, Roderick has no problem being open. It has been a couple weeks since he’s seen a girl that caught his interest. Most of the girls in town are too young or too old. He was starting to think that he’d never have a chance to find a girl even if he wanted to. With Alba coming to his door, he becomes convinced that he can’t let the moment pass by.
“Well, I was passing through a pub in the mountains—”
“A backwoods pub!” Roderick interrupts with a chuckle. “What were you doing in a place like that?”
“Do I not look like a girl who can handle herself?” she shoots back sharply.
Roderick immediately regrets his words, though he hadn’t meant it the way she seems to have taken it. Taverns in the mountains tend to be filled with all kinds of dangerous men. There i
s no right or wrong among such people, only wanting and getting.
Seeing that Alba’s disposition toward him has quickly become cold, Roderick tries to recover.
“No, it’s not that. I was just thinking that a girl as beautiful as you would simply want to avoid places like that because of the kinds of men whose eyes would shift your way.”
The complement brings a slight smile back to Alba’s face.
“Well, maybe you’re right, at least about the kind of filth that often fills those places,” she concedes, “but sometimes I can’t avoid it. It’s in places like that that you sometimes hear things that help point you in the right direction. Take an older gentleman a few weeks ago, for instance. He was sitting all alone at a table, slowly spinning a glass case between his hands. Can you guess what was inside?”
The memory of the gift warms Roderick’s heart.
“A flower,” he answers.
